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

May as well be the first to say it

[sssmashy]

"You've got a summons!"

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[k-0s]

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[MattCohn.com]

Mabey the editors could use some AOL...

"You've got dupes!!"

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[ahaning]

What's a summons?

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Dylan Zimmerman]

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[ahaning]

Thanks. I was actually wanting someone to reply with the next line in the Rocky & Bullwinkle skit...

"It's a summons."
"What's a summons?"
"It means sommon's in trouble!"

But, yeah, a factual reply works, too ;-).

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Pharmboy]

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.

Gotta start somewhere. Frankly, I think spam of the email variety is a worse misuse of resources, considering the volume. AOL SHOULD send out their CD's on CDRW media, so like the old days, at least you could reuse it ;)

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[apraetor]

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

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[k-0s]

This has been discussed before. You aren't charged for the cost of AOL cd delivery, so it's not the same as spam.

I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[k-0s]

Why? With physical spam, the costs are the sender's burden, not the recievers.

Like I said in the reply above, I'm charged with trash pick up so it does become my burden.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[FattMattP]

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.

Last time I checked, all of those CDs came postage paid. Let us know when you get a bunch of AOL CDs that come with postage due. That will be a more accurate analogy to spam.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[bsharitt]

Or they could ship USB thumb drives.

--

Purchase a DELL Axim X5 Handheld Today!

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Rombuu]

I think you have to go with the wittier: "You've Got Jail!"

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[k-0s]

Last time I checked, all of those CDs came postage paid. Let us know when you get a bunch of AOL CDs that come with postage due. That will be a more accurate analogy to spam.

My trash bill takes a hit from AOL physical spam about as much as our ISP bills take a hit from e-mail spam. Niether is good in my opinion. I'm not going to go broke over it but it is an annoyance.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[jaredmauch]

"You've got Certified Mail"

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Slurpee]

Why? With physical spam, the costs are the sender's burden, not the recievers.


What about the damage to our environment caused by junk mail?

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[ibsteveog]

I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[inaeldi]

Not according to my friend's mom. She couldn't grasp the concert of data just "disappearing", so I told her that it goes into the wall. As far as I know, that's what she still thinks.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Trailer Trash]

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

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[1u3hr]

Sorry, that was said the first time this story was posted a couple of hours ago.

AOL Sues Five Spam Companies
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday April 15, @08:15PM
from the 300-a-day-and-rising dept.
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"."

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[FreeMars]

> I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.

The coaster may be worthless, but I find the CD mailers handy. You can even slip out the AOL paper label and add your own.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[mcrbids]

And, might I add, the cost of SPAM filtering isn't cheap.

When you factor in TNEF expansion, antivirus, and Spam Asssassin, you can quickly take a server's normal load average of 0.3 up to 10 or more. (I've seen it!)

To protect a standard ISP customer, even "on the cheap" costs more than you'd think!

Sure, SpamAssassin on your *personal* system doesn't slow it down noticably, but what about when you are processing 10,000, 50,000, or 200,000 emails per day?

Let me assure you, the resources used aren't insignificant. Then you start talking about clustering, RAID, and multiple CPUs.

The essential problem with email is authentication. Solve this, and SPAM goes away.

I'd figure on using DNS-SEC to collapse DNS and SSL certificates into one mechanism (why would the server that tells you where to go - DNS - not then let you know if you really got there?) which would then allow for perfect back-tracing messages to the actual ISP customer.

This provides accountability, and this allows for direct recourse against would-be spammers, and suddenly, the criminal behavior that is SPAM becomes much more costly to the spammer.

Oh well. My own rants...

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[grammar fascist]

"You've got dupes!!"

Dupes? Who, the editors?

/me ducks

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[jhunsake]

Exactly. There are a lot more economic costs than just the money that leaves your pocket.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[slumos]

You aren't paying extra for trash pickup to deal with the pound or two of junkmail that you get each week.

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

?

The worst part is that while AOL has to pay, the spammers don't.

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[rking]

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.

Whilst I agree with you that it is not a free speech issue for other reasons, the courts are a branch of government and restraining someone from speaking by means of suing them raises free speech issues every bit as much as any other government issue. The courts themselves recognise this. The fact that AOL is a private entity bringing the case is not more relevant than if it were a private entity lobbying for a new law. Court rulings are always government action.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[rking]

This has been discussed before. You aren't charged for the cost of AOL cd delivery, so it's not the same as spam.

It costs me my time to wade through all this rubbish, and potentially missed opportunities by misclassifying a legitimate letter.

Would you be happier if I hired someone else to sort my mail as that way it would cost me money instead of time? My time is valuable to me and every bit as much a real cost.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[SeXy_Red]

I dont consider that spam, I see it more as free beer coasters:P

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[gujo-odori]

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[BrokenHalo]

email variety is a worse misuse of resources, considering the volume

Worse than chopping down trees? Not to mention the side-effects of the CD production and disposal process. Your priorities worry me...

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[gujo-odori]

slumos> 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.

You've obviously never worked in the ISP business.

The spammer is not paying for the delivery costs at all, just pumping out spam through a DSL or cable line (mostly - sometimes they use dialup), and sending the stuff through open relays and open proxies who are bearing most of the actual load of sending.

Moreover, those billion spams are not being sent by one person. They are being sent from a number of places and all converge on AOL and the other targets.

Having worked for an ISP myself, I can tell you something about the costs incurred in receiving spam. The load of spam filtering required us to run twice as many MXes as we would have needed if we were not being spammed. Even if we hadn't filtered, we still would have needed more MXes than we would have needed without spam. Because we could not raise prices in a competitive environment with a downward pricing trend, the hardware and personnel costs of spam filtering really cut into our already very thin profit margin.

slumos> If AOL has something to defend against, it's people who sign up, start getting 100 spams for every actual message immediately, and cancel.

The way to defend against that would be to eliminate the cause that makes those customers cancel. Since that cause is spam, suing the spammers into the poor house seems like a reasonable move.

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[haraldm]

The CDs don't abuse their infrastructure. But so what - as long as somebody goes after the Bad Guys [TM] that's okay.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[cabraverde]

You aren't charged for the cost of AOL cd delivery, so it's not the same as spam.

I don't know about you, but here in the UK our businesses pay for waste disposal by the sackfull. It's not cheap either.

My business pays out more for physical spam than for electronic spam, and we probably get typical amounts of each.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[jmping]

Just to point it out though, when you recieve junk mail, at least the corporations sending it to you are spending money for it. It costs them something (and you can just drop it in another mailbox and have it sent back to them too). Junk e-mail only costs the reciever and ISP. This means that there is really no significant disincentive towards spamming where real mail at least requires a cost-benefit analysis.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Bartmoss]

It's still annoying. And while I can opt-out from AOL cd spam (I did), I still get tons of flyers from local businesses/bars/whatever. I wish I could just burn down their offices in retaliation. I do have a big "no advertisement" sticker on my mailbox; that should be enough to sue their asses off.

Sigh...

It's time to stop ALL kinds of unwanted advertisement.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[julesh]

Look, if they didn't do this, we'd all have to buy drink coasters, right. And they're normally much bigger & heavier. So they're actually saving resources...

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[stephenbooth]

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.

The big difference is that the Spammer wants to send out those spams and has a choice in the matter. The recipient (and their connectivity supplier) does not want to recieve them but has no choice. Even if they are intercepted and filtered outside of the ISP's own network that still costs time and money, which could be used more productively elsewhere, and slows down legitmate mail.

And on the subject of AOL CDs, I don't think I can remember the last time I recieved one in the post was. Gotta be at least a couple of years since I last got one. Can't they be recycled in some way?

Stephen

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[theLOUDroom]

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.

Actually, I am. (I can't believe you got modded to +5.)

Last I knew, AOL CDs, true to the laws of physics, both had mass and took up space. Since I am charged by volume or mass for disposing of trash, then yes I am paying extra. It costs me $1/6 to dispose of two pounds of trash.

I wouldn't be suprised if this is actually more money than I spend downloading all the spam I get sent. Let's see:

200KB/sec DSL for $50/month.
200KB * 60 *60 * 24 * 30 = 518400000 KB/month total
200KB Spam /day * 30 days = 6000 KB/month of spam
1.1574e-03 percent of my monthly bandwidth is spent on spam
I spend $0.00057870 / month downloading spam.
I spend $0.71429 / month disposing of junk mail.
I have to pay much more to dispose of my snail mail spam than I have to pay to get my electronic spam.

You might get more electronic spam if you just look at the numbers, but you're not considering how much cheaper it is to dispose of 1 billion spam emails than it is to dispose of 1 billion AOL CDs. Not only that, it's easier to sort spam than physical junk mail, since I can't buy a mailbox that automatically throws out 90% of the physical junk mail I get.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Pharmboy]

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[darien]

This argument is fine and pragmatic so far as it goes; but I think the original poster's point was that it is wrong in principle for AOL to incur even a negligible cost to him (whether directly or through taxes). If a thousand companies were sending you junk CDs through the post it would be a major problem, but each could still argue - as you just have on AOL's behalf - that their own promo material was cheap and easy to dispose of. Indeed, a spammer could, by the same token, argue that he is not causing a nuisance because the amount of bandwidth you consume in receiving his 4k message is so tiny.

We should fight the perception that it's OK for advertisers to incur any cost to their victims - even when the amounts are so tiny they can hardly be measured. It's wrong in principle; and even very small costs have a way of adding up.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[ergo98]

There are more trees in the US now than there was 200 years ago.

This is like saying that farms bring nature to the countryside by creating a blight of pesticides and human intervention. The "trees" that you're so proud of are intentionally planted for their processing potential, and they are in no way replacements for the habitat supporting old growth forests they offset. I've gone camping in a "new growth" forest and it's spooky having a common cover height with virtually no ground growth, and an amazing dearth of wildlife. Note that I'm not making a big environmental statement here (I get a paper every morning and occasionally don't separate all of my recyclables properly), but just am pointing out that it's horribly absurd to make grand claims about how forested we are now.

In addition the other point of the poster is that CDs are a pretty much indefinite polycarbonate: Little shards of plastic that'll withstand probably thousands of years. CDs can be recycled but the process is rare and not very efficient at present (because the foil layer has to be separated).

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Zog The Undeniable]

Surely not the Isle of Man? Aren't they building a hideous new incinerator outside Douglas to burn all the trash?

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Pharmboy]

For the third time:

My point was simple. The email spam is causing a worse problem than the CD spam right now, in my opinion (obviously).

Crying "won't someone please think of the trees!" isn't going to impress me. Filling up landfills, thats a problem. But not as big a problem as the spam is causing in the near term, especially to the economy. Not all new growth forests are like you state. Granted, all the older ones (hense, the cover) ARE. Newer reforestation projects mix it up a bit better. I am sure you know this though.

I'm more of a 'the glass is half full' type of person. It is easy to point out all the shortcomings of our tree planting past, but I prefer to look at how much better we are NOW than just 50 years ago. My goal isn't to diminish anyone feelings about conservation, its just the doomsayers are so negative, and generally full of FUD that it gets old.

Its also ironic that MILITANT ENVIRONMENTALISTS are the same people that sell cheese sandwiches at Phish concerts and protest against liberating oppressed people. (OT but relevent anyway)

Humans are not a plague on this planet. When people make statements to this effect, they only insure their ideas will never get taken seriously, except in Oakland.

Again, some people ARE more freaked out about our environmental situation, but this doesn't mean they CARE more about it. It just means they are freaked out. And they think the worst is yet to come, while on average, rivers are cleaner, air is cleaner, and things are better than 20 or 50 years ago. Others (like myself) think we are headed in the right direction because it IS better than it was, and we are open minded to changes where it isn't (landfills, for instance).

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Alioth]

That's the problem. The hideous new incinerator is an enormous white elephant. The island doesn't generate enough trash to make an incinerator run efficiently, so it's going to be hideously expensive to run (or we'll have to import other people's junk to keep it running efficiently, and thus subsidise England's waste disposal). The hideous cost of running this ...thing... has resulted in the wonderful idea of charging everyone GBP100/tonne for waste to pay for it all.
So the unintended consequences of the incinerator is a worse environmental problem as people fly-tip to avoid the waste disposal charges, and the fly-tipping resulting in less waste feeding the incinerator, meaning the incinerator runs even more inefficiently.

The Island's problem with waste is a real one though - it's just the incinerator in its current form is not the answer - and now we're stuck with it.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Sj0]

Just what slashdot needs. A tree hugging hippy conspiracy theorist. I bet you'll tell me the hold in the ozone layer isn't shrinking next, or Global warming will kill us all.

Go back to the amazon rain forest, with the other hippies. Who live in igloos and wear parkas in 150 degree weather. :P

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[firewood]

So they sue spammers (that's good) but spam my postal mail box with CD's and they think it's ok?

One major difference is that postal spammers pay postage, which partially subsidizes the costs of my sending and receiving 1st class mail. This economic subsidy to me from paper spammers automatically limits how much gets sent on average. The problem with email spam is that there is no such economic limiter.

The other important difference is that postal spammers usually can spell correctly.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Sj0]

Its also ironic that MILITANT ENVIRONMENTALISTS are the same people that sell cheese sandwiches at Phish concerts and protest against liberating oppressed people. (OT but relevent anyway)

No it isn't, but I'll bite anyway.

I could argue that anyone who supports the "liberation" of Iraq is a weakminded fool who believes everything and anything he is told. This liberation talk only started happening when it was obvious that the vast majority of the world(think 70% of the population of the world) was against this war. You see, unlike what some of you would like to believe, the warmongers started talking about attacking Iraq over a year ago. Back then it wasn't about weapons of mass destruction, it wasn't about liberating the Iraqi people, it wasn't about broken UN resolutions or treaties. These people just said "well, Osama might have gone to Iraq....START BOMBING!!! THEY'RE HARBOURING TERRORISTS". This arguement was so flaccid and transparant that the Canadian prime minister decided then and there that if the US went to war against Iraq, Canada would not get involved. A few months later, the US government was changing it's story with a frequency that would make a kid with ADD envious. Finally they get this semi-plausable weapons of mass destruction arguement, but they get whomped for that story too, for various reasons. So, they decide to go to war anyway, and just before they rush in... "Oh yeah. We're not invading, we're liberating. You're not against the liberation of these people, are you? That would be wrong, what are you, a communist?".

Oh yeah. That 11th hour PR victory was their plan all along, and they always wanted to liberate Iraq from the terrible, terrible dictator(erm..that the US gave weapons to. Just forget that part.). Right. I guess you believe in Santa Claus too?

If the population of the US is so gullable that they buy this liberation crap, go right ahead, but don't bitch at the rest of us who can see through the incredibly transparant veil of spin-doctoring to see the truth that this liberation crap is just a bunch of bullshit cooked up at the last second to cover their asses.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Sj0]

Tell that to the idiots paying a hundred bucks for a pair of jeans with a certain name on them.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Sj0]

AOL isn't the government, nor is any other ISP. Free speech arguments, therefore, cannot apply to AOL.

Nope, but the courts are. Since AOL is suing the spammers, there are indeed free speech issues.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[dsa777]

Work for the Post Awful for awhile and you'll understand. Or do a little research on postal revenue and your confusion will be cleared up.
Spammers do their evil with pennies. Catalog companies at least have to pay a bit.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Pharmboy]

If the population of the US is so gullable that they buy this liberation crap, go right ahead, but don't bitch at the rest of us who can see through the incredibly transparant veil of spin-doctoring to see the truth that this liberation crap is just a bunch of bullshit cooked up at the last second to cover their asses.

I will gladly admit that liberation was a secondary reason at best. I support the primary reason: The asshole had lots of weapons, and not enough money, and there are lots of people who may not like him, but like us LESS and would gladly put up with him long enough to buy weapons. In that part of the world, the idea that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is very valid. I supported and voted for Ross BECAUSE we had not gone in and finished the job by liberating Iraq to begin with. I was a founding member of United We Stand, and had a multiline BBS very much dedicated to politics after our failure to free them. Many frieds were in Desert Storm. I am a vet. My father spent 21 years in, including in Korea and Vietname. Iraq has been on my mind a very long time, and I AM aware of the risks and rewards.

I am STILL glad we liberated the Iraqi's and my opinion is we need to do the unthinkable: Liberate others and educate their women. I say we SHOULD go and liberate other countries. It is preferable to do it without military force, but what ever it takes. Iran and N. Korea are good examples where military force would probably be the WORST way to liberate. Siria could go either way. Saudi Arabia is a sticky problem too. But free people generally don't support terrorism.

I don't appologize for thinking we need to liberate MORE countries rather than less. Liberation is almost never the primary reason, but it IS the lasting consequence that prevents further problems. For my money, liberation is a good thing, even if you don't agree with the primary reasons for going in. You disagree. Thats fine. Isn't it great we both live in free countries where its ok to debate this?

Any country that doesn't allow you and I to freely and openly discuss and disagree about this would be on my short list.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Dylan Zimmerman]

Oh. I can't say that I've ever heard that one.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[ahaning]

S'okay. Judging by your UID, you haven't been logging in here very long. It was someone's .sig at one time.

I usually remember people's .sigs more than their nicks, though, so don't fret it.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[JuggleGeek]

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.

A spammer can pay $19.95 (at most) for a dial up account, and send tons of messages that month. He doesn't have to store those messages. The ISP that he is using probably hasn't planned on any given customer useing that much bandwidth. The costs are, for the most part, spread out among the various ISP's that are receiving the messages.

Claiming that it costs more to send spam than to receive it is ridiculous.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Sj0]

I think you raise a couple good points, but you're playing a dangerous games there. All it takes is a few whole-scale invasions for "the enemy of the enemy is my freind" to kick in again, and a band of dictators, seeing that the US is serious about assassinating the leaders of these countries in addition to invading the countries, get together to launch a real attack on America(and not a couple angry guys in the middle of a desert plotting to take down a monument or two).

I've never thought that the old "Like me! <smack!> Like me! <smack!>" way of doing things works, and this is an extention of that. New destruction rarely breeds peace.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Pharmboy]

All it takes is a few whole-scale invasions for "the enemy of the enemy is my freind" to kick in again, and a band of dictators, seeing that the US is serious about assassinating the leaders of these countries in addition to invading the countries, get together to launch a real attack on America

I see your point, but they already did this on 9-11. Like I said, Iran and N. Korea are good examples of where to NOT just invade. Siria will probably either cooperate, or find a few select targets hit (camps, not govt. buildings). Although I prefer mutual respect, sometimes the fear of us turning them into a parking lot has to suffice. This corner of our globe has acheived tremendous wealth, but not through education, conquest or hard work, but from a hole in the ground. This has led to more money than common sense in some of the governments. Some people just don't understand the 'carrot' approach, which is why the stick comes in handy.

Already Saudi Arabia and Qatar are introducing and/or talking about democratic reforms. Granted, this won't lead to anything truly democratic, but its a SEED. Freedom grows like a week, once it gets established, its hard to get rid of. The main point is at least they are moving in that direction, and while they are terrible examples of government, they are not AS oppressive as Iraq was. Women still are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, for instance.

Had we not gone in and rolled over Saddam, these tiny reforms would not have happened at all. Its a start. It also helps to push other countries in the same direction. Momentum.

Arabs liking us is not my biggest concern, although it would make many things easier. With this region, its easy to make friends when you are perceived as strong anyway. We don't like the French very well, but there is no chance of a war with them.

OT, but did you hear about the French military rifle for sale on Ebay? "Never fired, only dropped once.".....

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Sj0]

You know what? If that were the reason for going in, I'd be 100% behind the war and smacking around anyone who disagreed with it. A brilliant piece of strategy like that, utilizing a single war as a mere piece of such a grand strategy, would be something I could support, and in fact, something very close to what I have advocated from the beginning (ie. fight the base problems of terrorism, not the terrorists themselves). The problem is that I don't believe anyone in the current administration has that kind of forsight. Everything points to the effects of this war being a mere side effect to the bungling of a barely literate president and a weak, collectively gullable congress.

I wish to be proven wrong though. I don't think it'll happen though.

About Time!

[Pete Brubaker]

GO AOL!

Re:About Time!

[Noodleroni]

ME TOO! GO AOL!

;-)

Is this a repeat?

[amarodeeps]

I think?

Re:Is this a repeat?

[VivianC]

Just think of it as /. spam.

Re:Is this a repeat?

[Rick the Red]

I wonder the same thing, and I'm not kidding.

Re:Is this a repeat?

[Avlimator]

It's more like 13 and a half hours later (AM vs. PM). In all seriousness though, it does really make you wonder. I usually laugh off all the ridiculousness on Slashdot because it is after all a community run information site (does anyone actually get paid to do this?), and you can only expect so much. Usually I just scan the headlines for any interesting articles and only occasionally read the comments because of that assumption.

Re:Is this a repeat?

[jhunsake]

Slashdot because it is after all a community run information site

Not hardly. It is owned by a corporation with publicly traded stock, and yes, people do get paid to do this. Quite a bit, I'd imagine.

Re:Is this a repeat?

[Avlimator]

Evidently my sarcasm was a little too subtle.

Arg!!!

[Keebler71]

Argh!!!! Who do we hate more?! Spammers or AOL? Thank goodness MS isn't involved in this story or I'd be really perplexed.

Re:Arg!!!

[t0ny]

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"

Re:Arg!!!

[Dynedain]

Well, I don't mean to add another layer of confusion for you....but the article is a dupe. :)

Re:Arg!!!

[Trogre]

I think the official order is something like this (sorted from least evil to most evil):

1. Intel
2. AOL
3. RIAA/MPAA
4. Spammers
5. Microsoft

Re:Arg!!!

[f97tosc]

Argh!!!! Who do we hate more?! Spammers or AOL? Thank goodness MS isn't involved in this story or I'd be really perplexed.

If you hate both Spammers and AOL you should happy that they are fighting each other.

Tor

Re:Arg!!!

[dAzED1]

Eep! I don't hate intel - I own stock from them!

Did I mention how WONDERFUL intel is??? Did I? And its such a great buy right now...

Re:Arg!!!

[Zalgon 26 McGee]

You left option 6:

Cowboy Neal

Re:Arg!!!

[Guppy06]

I'd say spammers. AOL at least gave us Mozilla. That, and you never see anybody on Slashdot cheering a movie made by spammers.

Re:Arg!!!

[Peterus7]

What about spyware corporations? They deserve to be on there somewhere.

And they deserve to be sued by a megacorp as well... Simply because they've ruined so many people's computers...

Dupe?

[headjack]

Didn't we see this earlier today?
Or are AOL stories like AOL CD's...

Dupedy-dupe-dupe!

[zmcgrew]

Dupe!

Hmm...
Spam tacos...
or Spam burgers?

Duplicate spam burgers! Twins!
Hahaha!

dupalicious

[Joe the Lesser]

AOL already has 5 more suits, wow, they're really piling them on, since just earlier today it was reported that they had five initial suits!

Re:dupalicious

[Grizzlysmit]

AOL already has 5 more suits

It's good to know their finally changing there clothing, but don't they need more than five suits for the whole company.

AOL?!

[hobbesmaster]

Can I sue AOL for spamming me with CDs and floppy disks for the last decade?

Re:AOL?!

[pauljlucas]

No, but you can file a US Postal Prohibitory Order against them to stop them from mailing you CDs. If they mail you a CD after that, the US Postal Service will go after them.

Thanks to 397 US 728: Rowan, DBA American Book Service, et al., v. United States Post Office Department, et al., 1970, you can prohibit the receipt of anything by US Postal mail.

Re:AOL?!

[hetairoi]

Better yet, can I sue /. for spamming me with duplicate stories?

Update by T

[Anonymous Coward]

I can predict the future:

Update: (some future date) by T: Yes, it's a dupe.

Re:Update by T

[Teach]

Is it possible to have a little button attached to the story description so that subscribed users seeing the article via "The Mysterious Future" can tag it as a dupe to report it to the editors before it goes live?

You could restrict it to subscribed users with a certain amount of karma maybe, and require a URL for the earlier story to make it easier to verify.

Just a thought.

AOL doing something...helpful?

[samurairas]

Wait a minute.

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.

Nonetheless, this does have the potential to be of benefit to denizens of the net, at least in the short term. Plus, it's fun to watch the evil corporation track down the people breaking their TOS.

Re:AOL doing something...helpful?

[Pharmboy]

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?

Re:AOL doing something...helpful?

[rootofevil]

nah its probably not even THAT pure an innocent. i bet its cuz they are strapped for cash and they figure they can get a ton out of these spammers, AND keep the money in their own spam system.

its a win-win situation for them.

Re:AOL doing something...helpful?

[shirai]

I completely agree with this statement and would like to take it even a step further.

Spam is raising their mail related IT expenses "more" (perhaps much more) than 1/3 because dealing with spam is more difficult than dealing with regular email that the recipient wants. For example, processing a single complaint from a spam is something you would never have to do with a desire email.

Instant Karma..

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the previous posting of this article and repost a few of the +5's.
Instant Karma!!

I posted as AC now but I bet the first few +5's here will be from me!! HAHAHA

Re:Instant Karma..

[actor_au]

Bastard, you stole my Idea
But then again, you did get a +2 by posting a dupe, so it worked at least a little bit, just like it did last time...
The Irony of this is probably going to kill me.

backbone

[Eric Smith]

Perhaps if more ISPs took action, we might see the backbone providers doing so as well?

Much though I hate spam (I get several hundred a day), I certainly hope you're not proposing that the backbone providers should try to classify or filter traffic. This should be done near the edge of the internet, not in the middle. The risk of misidentification is too high.

Re:backbone

[HiThere]

A real point. Attacks directed against genuine spammers are one thing. Attacks directed against "he might be a spammer" are a totally different kettle of fish.

Recent comments about ISPs cutting off people who merely run active mailing list servers really cause me to wonder about how one could replace them (the ISPs). The best answer I have so far is to give your business to the smaller ones..even if it costs a bit more (You *do* want premium service don't you?).

Re:backbone

[azpenguin]

Not to mention that some of the backbone providers make a good portion of their business by selling bandwidth to spammers. They won't cut their own throats like that.

AOL is doing what small Isp s' won't do

[zymano]

If regular internet users would have contributed to some fund to kill(sue) these spammer guys early on ,we wouldn't have a problem with spam.

Wow...

[chrisgeleven]

The admin's can't even scroll about 3/4's of the way down the front page to see if there was a dupe? Pathetic

Finally...

[black mariah]

I like it when companies finally realise they're capable of actually working FOR their customers. And tell me, who here would prefer 500 spam mails a day over 3 AOL discs a week? Nobody? Exactly what I think. AOL's discs provide me with free CD cases and coasters. What is there to complain about? When you're sick of having a half billion coasters you simply give them to your local recreation center to be used as frisbees, or to a nice gun club for skeet shooting practice. Spread the love.

Re:Finally...

[Dylan Zimmerman]

I prefer MSN disks. You know, the ones that come in the DVD cases. Of course, AOL's been putting some of their CDs into tins lately. Pretty ritzy stuff.

Re:Finally...

[irving47]

Which do you suppose is harder? Keeping a Mac (or PC with *nix/*BSD) Microsoft free, or keeping free of AOL CD's when you own more than one computer?

uuummm...CNN...

[frozencesium]

had this story on TV when i woke up almost 14 hours ago...the slashdoters must be slipping...

of course...as others will/have mentioned...AOL going after spammers???

to quote a very decent movie "talk about the pot and the fucking kettle..."

-frozen

Re:uuummm...CNN...

[Spy Hunter]

CNN had this story on TV when i woke up almost 14 hours ago...the slashdoters must be slipping...

Not at all! Slashdot had this story on the front page almost 14 hours ago too! They just thought it was so important that you needed to see it again.

Go AOL!

[Pilferer]

I'm starting to like AOL... *TWO* major anti-spam lawsuits announced... in the same day? Wow! /sarcasm

Serves em right!

[quantaman]

AOL is going to spam them with lawsuits!

Hey why are you looking at me like that!

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.

Re:They are not just going after the spammers

[Dylan Zimmerman]

Well, they could, but a lot of products advertized in spam constitute fraud. They only need to give you enough of an address to send them your money. They can get 500 P.O boxes and register them to non-existant companies (or even to individuals who sent the spammer their address). Spam, rinse, repeat.

Re:They are not just going after the spammers

[1u3hr]

They can get 500 P.O boxes

Then they're into mail fraud, and if across state lines they have broken a lot more serious laws and risk real jail time when they come to collect the mail or deposit the cheques.

Re:They are not just going after the spammers

[dwighteb]

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

.

LOL - Is there such a thing as ethically advertising products? This shoulda been +5 funny

Re:They are not just going after the spammers

[Dylan Zimmerman]

Well, yeah, there is that. However, this is just something that I came up with on a moment's thought. I'm sure that anyone serious about defrauding you could do it in a much less traceable way that would keep them from getting caught.

Re:Let's think...

[OldMiner]

Call me strange, but there's already a precedent to deal with this problem: Make comments available to subscribers prior to posting the story; check the comments before actually posting to the front page. Fark does it with Total Fark and has done it for months [natch, they allow all submission to be viewed by subscribers, but Slashdot editors have shown adverse reactions to such an idea]. Dupes are detected pretty reliably by readers, as evidenced by the first four comments on this story. If they want to be real bastards and make more work for themselves, they could even nuke all comments posted prior to the public live time so that you wouldn't see subscribers competing for first post rights.

Or perhaps take the rather simple route of exposing those 'dupe detection' scripts to the world that supposedly help combat this problem. I didn't see them on the slashcode CVS when I checked. Perhaps if we had access to those, someone would kindly touch them up to be a little more intelligent perhaps allowing the editors to look a little more intelligent.

And another thing...

[black mariah]

Haven't any of you realised that NOW they're just posting dupes to piss you off? I didn't think so. ;)

Christ...

[$0 31337]

Comon you guys... Slashdot gets lamer and lamer the more you stop caring. If you don't bother to scroll half way down the first fucking page of your own website to check and see if it already posted then why should your readers bother coming back.

Calm down

[d3ut3r0n]

Little freaks saying "dupe" - it't not the end of the world. Anyway, depsite many people hating AOL, this, for once, looks like a step in the right direction to winning back confidence for the dubious ISP. Now, if everyone would stop pretending they're experts on the constitution and free speech and everyone got serious about attacking spam'ers, it would be alot more constructive than posting "dupe, dupe" cries.

Re:Calm down

[1u3hr]

. Now, if everyone would stop pretending they're experts on the constitution and free speech and everyone got serious about attacking spam'ers, it would be alot more constructive than posting "dupe, dupe" cries.

No amount of tough talk against spammers here will make any difference in the real world (I did like the snail mail DOS on the spammer that arose from the story here a few monthhs ago though). But one hopes that embarrassing the editors by pointing out their unprofessionalism might motivate them into giving a shit, though that is looking unlikely too.

Re:Let's think...

[callipygian-showsyst]

NEWSFLASH!

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.

oh please oh please

[autopr0n]

Let Ralsky be amoung the sued!

Its all been said before, but...

[respite]

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.

Not a dupe

[djupedal]

...it is a 'parallel post'.

Re:Not a dupe

[Eskarel]

Maybe we should find those researchers, there seems to be a lot of parallel posting here at /. Of course when you can see two copies of the same post on the front page at one time, that's pretty sad, even here.

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.

Re:Hold those who host spammers responsible

[realdpk]

Or, Rackspace will look at the checks they're getting from the spammers, including the "look the other way" fee, and will smile happily in their bling-bling cars and hot hookers.

Point being Rackspace knows about the spam, they're not going to be convinced to care about it. Go after the spammers rather than the ISPs, reduce collateral damage, and make actual progress.

Re:Hold those who host spammers responsible

[silentbozo]

The whole point of collateral damage is to cripple an ISP so severely that they have no choice but to address the problem. When you start losing new and existing customers because your netblocks have become useless, it becomes easier to do the math that results in kicking spammers off of your feed.

Of course, I'd rather that the black hats just go under - taking the spammer's pre-paid deposits with them. :)

Re:Hold those who host spammers responsible

[Sentry21]

This is definitely true. My former boss, who is a big friend of Alan Ralsky himself (one of my co-workers has actually had to deal with him personally) was thinking about moving all of his operaetions to Rackspace, because they don't honestly care.

My coworker tried to persuade the boss to go a route of 'well, if we have to spam, can we at least try not to get caught, or try not to burn our bridges,' in the hopes that when he finally left that hellhole, he could still have his calls to data centres returned afterwards.

In the end, the company had to move offices, and their ISP refused to relocate their connection without a signed statement that they would never again support spam, and also a $10,000 deposit, 'just in case'. Said company will probably go out of business if they have to compete on the basis of the quality of their products and services.

--Dan

Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[rossjudson]

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. :)

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[rossjudson]

P.S. The AOL client would make a hell of a DDOS'er.

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[Pharmboy]

Is this illegal?

Illegal is so many ways I can't count them (IANAL but I read /., which is better) And its some other not good things too.

It is an attack to deprive them of $$. Its a conspiracy because you are working in tandum with others. Its taking justice into your own hands when it isn't warranted. Its ineffectual. It affects other resources on the internet, which is why you are mad at him to start with, making it hypocritical. Since spam isn't illegal per se yet (and it should be) it is quazi/potentially denying him free speech (no, but would be argued in court that way). I could go on, but I'm tired.

I don't argue with your anger, but this would end up worse than the problem for most all concerned. We need laws and more importantly, inforcement. If we can do the inforcement without the laws, then that is good, too. Your idea may have the best of intentions, but thats not always enough.

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Just post the URL on Slashdot.

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[rossjudson]

Illegal is so many ways I can't count them (IANAL but I read /., which is better)

Maybe you should try and count them.

It is an attack to deprive them of $$

So what.

Its a conspiracy because you are working in tandum with others

Do I have the right to ping or attempt to identify the source of an email sent to me? Can I automate this process? What if I can send a spam email to a central server, and in response, it gives me an address on the internet that I can probe to get more information. My little automated gadget then probes that address. I'm not conspiring with anybody -- I'm requesting that the source of an email be given to me, and I'm checkin' it out.

It affects other resources on the internet

Yes -- upstream from the spammer, certainly. I don't have a problem with that.

I could go on, but I'm tired

No, I just think you ran out of things to say. Try again.

If they have the right to send me an email, I have the right to figure out where it came from and probe that address. A little automated help to do this certainly can't hurt anyone.

Cloudmark SpamNet could easily factor this kind of probe into their reporting system.

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[ColaMan]

Nonsense.

They're on the internet. Normal tcp/ip traffic from a number of hosts should be no hassle to them - if they don't want it, unplug.

How about a small monitoring program that just pings once a minute to make sure that their host server is alive? It would be a service to them , as a token of our appreciation for all the informative emails they've been sending to us.

We *need* to do this , because *so* many people would miss out on their *important* products and services if their server failed!!!

And since their messages simply *must* be delivered , we'll need a few redundant clients to make absolutely sure that things are ok .... about 10,000 clients should give us five nines.

Hey, we could even email them a warning if the ping time was over a set limit!

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[jmv]

I think I've got a better (more ironic) variant. Have an automated tool that replies (to the right address, which of course needs to be found) and says I'm interested in [insert product name extracted from message]. Not only would that DDOS them, but it would also make it impossible for them to distinguish the replies from "victims" from the rest.

Of course, there's still the problem of identifying the target and making sure we don't cause problems to 3rd parties. Maybe the solution could be to maintain a sort of database that gets (manually if necessary) updated with a correspondance between spam messages and e-mail to reply to?

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[Courageous]

Is this illegal?

Yes. AFAICR, a felony, and a federal crime. You may as well say "trace them back to origination, hack them, and set up a multipass wipe on their HD." While they'd deserve this, it wouldn't be very wise.

C//

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[silentbozo]

Forget the DDOS on the spammers. Target the routers that allow them to peer instead. Find those IPs, add them to a global blocking table (a voluntary one, of course), and just drop their packets like mad.

It's less resource intensive than trying to ping them to death, and it's more satisfying to let them scream when nobody can hear them...

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[zcat_NZ]

419 spammers are ripe for this;

They always give you a valid reply address (although often it's not valid for very long).

English is usually not their first language, plus they're already expecting replies from stupid people so the replies don't have to make perfect sense or be gramatically correct.

SpamAssassin identifies 419 scams very reliably.

I was thinking about writing an eliza-like autoresponder for 419 scammers. They'd have to treat every reply as a possible victim, and if there were a few hundred of these things replying it would be almost impossible for them to continue working the scam.

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[Pharmboy]

Nonsense.

They're on the internet. Normal tcp/ip traffic from a number of hosts should be no hassle to them - if they don't want it, unplug.

No, attacking a network is illegal, even if they are dicks. Jesus, I can't believe the both of you don't understand that. You can't just DDOS someone you don't like and expect there to be no consequences.

Like it or not, spam IS legal right now, and doing a DDOS is illegal. Your ass would go to jail and the spammer wouldn't. Real smart. Yea, you showed him alright.

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[poot_rootbeer]

A DDOS arms race out there on the internet is something that will happen sooner or later.

God, I hope not. The last thing we need is for the internet in general to start resembling an IRC network.

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[rossjudson]

Note my refinement above. I am not DDOSing anybody. I am just a lowly email user whose email client can check a service to find out where an email really came from. I am then probing that address.

The DDOS effect comes from the fact that if they send out several million emails, several million people might respond with probes. There is no direct decision to begin an attack. If no crap email is sent out, no attack occurs. It's a one-for-one, tit-for-tat.

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[Courageous]

The collaboration itself, with the intent to DDOS, makes it one.

C//

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[rossjudson]

You don't seriously want to be the spammer who's going to walk into court and try and convince a jury that it's ok for YOU to send data to people, but not ok for them to send data to you, do you?

Re:Voluntary DDOS on Spammers

[Courageous]

I don't think you're listening. If by collaboration with your friends you understand the impact of what it is you are proposing to do, the enactment thereof would be illegal. It's the obvious willful malice that's the distinguisher here. Clever disavowments to the contrary may or may not get you off, but if any evidence whatsoever were presented that you knew, or simply ought to know, that the impact of your actions was denial of service, you'd be going up against a felony charge. This wouldn't be the spammer trying to convince the jury, it would be the DISTRICT ATTORNEY. Criminal cases are brought by the GOVERNMENT. The spammer only has to make a COMPLAINT.

Ya with me?

Anyway, I'm done here. A little bit of listening now might save you having to hire an attorney later, though. It's a long fall off the the beanstalk, Jack.

C//

And in other News,,,

[neurostar]

slashdot has sued itself over spamming their main page with dupes of stories.

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..

Re:Some Way?

[Maxwell_E]

While I agree that your idea contains a substantial technical merit worthy of discussion I would like to propose a simpler, and perhaps less error prone method. In this method (patent pending) I propose that the editors of slashdot remove the crack pipe from their mouth and attempt to remember what they did five (5) minutes ago. Unlike my father, who has a glial blastoma tumor, and has a significant portion of his brain removed, the average slashdot editor should have a short term recall better than say, your average white ritalin suburbanite. Oh wait...

Re:Some Way?

[dachshund]

Would there be some good way to have people identify dupes?

Nothing like a complex, time-consuming technical implementation to solve a problem that a little bit of editorial competence might otherwise solve :)

Of course, my current theory is that the editors simply dupe those articles which they believe are really, really important.

Re:Some Way?

[aspjunkie]

Yeah, i agree its a pretty complex way to solve a minorly annoying problem.. and probably not worth the time and effort..

Re:Some Way?

[cjsnell]

I'd guess that 90% of the dupes would be eliminated if Slash could scan prior stories for occurances of the URL(s) in the current story and report this to the editor before he/she posts. I mentioned this years ago, it got modded up, and nothing ever became of it.

Re:Some Way?

[Bartmoss]

My suggestion: have subscribers report dupes during the mysterious future time. Since posting isn't allowed during that time, no harm is done if the dupe gets pulled.

Re:Some Way?

[gmby]

I have a better idea! Don't read slashdot so much that you always notice the dups!

Re:Let's think...

[stevejsmith]

Dot-com dollars? No, dot-ORG dollars. It's slashdot.ORG, darling.

If AOL can sue spammers...

[mhesseltine]

Can we sue Taco & crew for posting duplicate stories? I wasted 5 minutes of time on this article. My time is billed at $100/hr. Taco owes me $8.33

Re:If AOL can sue spammers...

[sstory]

I am skeptical that your time is billed at $100/hr.

Re:Let's think...

[YetAnotherName]

That's right, it's slashdot.org (a subsidiary of osdn.com).

dupe

[netblade83]

does a dupe count as spam?.... im calling MY lawyer

Responsive Customer Service

[sco08y]

With another 8 billion complaints, maybe I can get my account cancelled!

I can see it now....

[theoddball]

...ten zillion "free" AOLSummons CDs clogging up spammers' mailboxes and stuffed in their magazines. All AOL has to do is what they know best...

Difference..

[Inoshiro]

Online spam can't be opted out of, nor is there a cost to the spammer for sending it.

I think the greater weirdness is how /.ers hate spam, but when AOL fights spam (by blocking netblocks and sueing spammers), most /.ers who are moderated up are against it.

So which is it? Do we support the largest ISP's action against spam, or do we suck up the spam?

Re:Difference..

[k-0s]

Online spam can't be opted out of, nor is there a cost to the spammer for sending it.

I think the greater weirdness is how /.ers hate spam, but when AOL fights spam (by blocking netblocks and sueing spammers), most /.ers who are moderated up are against it.

So which is it? Do we support the largest ISP's action against spam, or do we suck up the spam?

My message says "(which is good)" which means them fighting it is good. It'd be better if they stopped spamming my postal box also.

this is what ISPs should have been doing all along

[the_2nd_coming]

it costs money to transport all those junk e-mails sue the spammers and then there is no money in it for the spammers

Ralsky?

[KilerCris]

Anyone know if our good buddy mr. ralsky will be getting some of the good news?

I sure hope so.

Re:Ralsky?

[lactose99]

He's too busy ordering out of 6000 copies of L.L. Bean, Publisher's Clearinghouse and What On Earth! to notice.

Re:Let's think...

[Dub Kat]

It seems to have gotten progressively worse over the past couple months. I'd at least read the frontpage headlines as a /. editor, which should be enough to jog the memory when looking at story submissions. But I guess they don't always read their own headlines...

However, after a couple years of this (which most of the editors are at, and more), maybe this would get to be a really boring job. Time for new blood?

From the not likely dept...

[wo1verin3]

>>Perhaps if more ISPs took action, we might see
>>the backbone providers doing so as well?"

Not likely since backbone providers bill the ISP based on the amount of traffic, traffic = $$$ as far as the backbone provider is concerned.

well, at least the icon is different

[harlows_monkeys]

Oh well...at least this time it uses the little pig icon, instead of the AOL icon, so it's not a complete dupe of another story that is still on the fucking front page.

Question: how fucking hard would it be for Slashdot editors to at least read the current front page before posting stories????.

Idiots.

From the Book of Illiad

[EvilTwinSkippy]

From the Book of Illiad...[userfriendly.org]

You can opt-out, right?

[Inoshiro]

There should be real laws about this to stop them from harrasing you.

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:AOL is suing a Norton spammer

[1u3hr]

Question: could/would Symantec join in this suit, or better still bring copyright violation and (ahem)piracy charges against this fool?

I thought that these Norton disks were actually old OEM ones (ie, real disks, originally bundled, or intended to be bundled) with PCs. That's not piracy, if it were you can be sure Symantec would have gone after them for that long ago.

Re:AOL is suing a Norton spammer

[frankie]

could/would Symantec join in this suit

They filed their own suit, on the same day by coincidence. Not a good day in the life of George Moore. Poor poor spammer.

Re:AOL is suing a Norton spammer

[JuggleGeek]

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.

I used to report Symantec and McAfee spams to the companies, but I've given up. Checking back, the sites don't seem to go away, which tells me that even when the spam is reported to Symantec, they aren't doing anything about it. I'm fairly convinced that either they are having "independant marketers" send the spam, while trying to pretend that they aren't involved, or that they have decided that people who buy the pirated versions will end up coming back to them for updates and such, as you suggest.

I can't see any way that the spammers sites could stay up month after month, even after the spam has been reported to Symantec (or McAfee) unless those companies were doing nothing to try and get rid of it.

Re:Let's think...

[stevejsmith]

New blood! Jiiiiihad! (Said in cowboy-accented voice, joke courtesy of public radio.)

Oh dear...

[Oscar_Wilde]

I hate being sent the same e-mail over and over again. I hate the same CDs being posted to me over and over again.

But most of all I hate newspapers and websites with repeated articles... oh wait.

Thank you slashdot. This story really was so interesting the first time that it just had to be posted again.

8 Million?

[Jim_Hawkins]

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. ;-)

Re:8 Million?

[Dynedain]

I haven't used AOL since '97...but my parents still have my account open, and the stupid mail icon that appears on Trillian really pisses me off....

anyways, where i was going with this....the last time i went to the web-based email for my screenname to delete the spam...there was a button to "report spam"...just click it, it blocks the sender's address, deletes the mail, and forwards it to AOLs spam department. I assume they have a similar feature in the full client app. Considering how much spam my AOL account gets (more than my real accounts, and Cloudmark SpamNet has blocked over 85000 spam emails on my real acounts in the last year), the numbers AOL is claiming doesn't suprise me at all. If each of their customers each reported only 1 piece of spam, they would have even more complaints than they claim.

If AOL can sue

[notext]

Then shouldn't I be able to sue them for every piece of spam I have recieved from @aol.com? Turnabout seems fair to me. It using bandwidth I pay for and time I value.

Re:If AOL can sue

[stevejsmith]

Since when do you pay for bandwidth? Users don't pay for bandwidth, ISPs pay for bandwidth. Well, in a broad sense, that is. When's the last time you got annoyed because a page was 10% bigger, forcing you to download 10% more? However if the entire Internet got 10% bigger tomorrow (you know, with, say, Slashdot dupes? ;-) the ISPs would be in deep shit.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Let's think...

[ergo98]

The submitter may have submitted the story days ago, and the "editors" just got around to accepting/rejecting it (I know I've had stories sitting in the bin for up to two days before they get around to rejecting them).

Double standard of community opinon?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[Stormie]

Just in case you're interested, this comment was cut'n'pasted from here, in the story that this one was a dupe of. I can't decide if it was moderated up to (+5, Insightful) as an ironic nod to my performance art dissing of Slashdot's incessant dupes, or if it's because the moderators are basically rock-stupid.

Either way, mad props to rearden (304396) for the original comment.

How to cause spammers legal grief...

[scdeimos]

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.

anyone who had aol

[chadamir]

will remember that when you signed on, they would bombard you with ads that you'd have to say no thanks to in order to ultimately reach the service. These werent from an outside source, they were directly from aol(big shock). Then when you got to your email, there was horse porn.

Re:Let's think...

[stevejsmith]

Nah...this particular article is dated April 15.

Do me a favor

[wowbagger]

Do me a favor - read the March Linux Journal (which contains my letter to the editor).

Then write LJ in response to their response to my response to Rackspace's ad.

Regarding Slashdot Editors....

[mimmm]

....."imagine a Beowolf cluster of those!!"

Would that be massively parallel posting? a.

woah, talk about deja-vu

[Indy1]

must be another glitch in the matrix.......

agent smith, STOP kicking the story generating server!!! And feed the Timonthy battery while your at it, i think its getting grumpy.

Evil Quotient factors

[mr. methane]

Perhaps I can help clarify the method of assigning an EQ (Evil Quotient) to an organization. As on Slashdot, a higher number is generally good.

CEO has visible body piercings: +1
Company is profitable: +1 .. for more than two business quarters: -2
They make something you like: +2 .. but you have to actually pay for it: -3
CEO denounces another CEO with a 0 EQ: +1
Company allows wearing of sandals in office: +1
Company requires workers to actually work: -4
Company has more than 100 employees: -1
Board meetings are held in exotic locations: +2 .. specifically, non-extradition countries: -3
Company changes name after "that incident": -2
Company makes the most popular products: -4
Company makes neat stuff you'd never buy: +3

I'm only hitting the major check-offs here.

Dr. Evil impression

[fbg111]

AOL in best Dr. Evil voice: "I've decided to sue spammers for... ten miiiiillion dollars!!!" [deviously puts pinky finger to corner of mouth].
No. 2: " Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than ten million dollars? Ten millions dollars isn't exactly a lot of money to spammers. They make hundreds of millions of dollars each year."
AOL: "Really?"
No. 2: "mm-hmm"
AOL: "That's a number. Okay then. We sue them for.....One hundred..BILLION DOLLARS!!"

Oh well, I guess AOL doesn't have a No. 2 working for them...

Re:Dr. Evil impression

[weeboo0104]

I thought the head of AOL/TimeWarner WAS a big No.2.

C'mon Eds....read the previous news posts..

[Svet-Am]

I try to give a lot of leeway on admin kinds of things, coz I know how hard it can be....

But, c'mon guys. This news bit was already posted on, on the same day. Do the eds even read /. themselves? my theory summises that they do not, given the recent (meaning weeks) slew of repeat posts...OVER AND OVER AND OVER again.

I know, this is probably a troll bait, and I probably have being modded down coming to me, but pardon me for wanting the eds to ensure that news is only reported once.

I'm confused.... This is Tuesday, isn't it?

[CSG_SurferDude]

I thought on Tuesdays we were supposed to hate AOL, and love the little ISPs.

Did somebody change the /. calendar again on me?

Re:Something is fundamentally wrong here

[Gilgaron]

If you make it pay per email, everyone will switch to a free alternative. ICQ springs to mind.

Then people will spam that (not that they don't try on occasion)

Reminder to Timothy:

[CSG_SurferDude]

Reminder to Timothy: You need to remember to logout of your terminal when you leave your desk (or at least lock your screen); otherwise CmdrTaco will post Dupes from your account.

BTW: The Secret Service will probably be giving you a call in the morning also... Taco CC'd all of us on your message to The President.

this is not a dupe...

[havaloc]

...it's an encore performance

Is repeating stories considered spamming ?

[motox]

Find your repeated Slashdot story along with the AOL coaster fresh in your mailbox every day ! :)

Re:Is repeating stories considered spamming ?

[motox]

I just noticed, it's not only a dupe, its repeated twice on the same page ! Hurrah the editors who don't read their own paper. Now we just need a dupe from the same person in the same page. Maybe when they will l-e-g-a-l-i-z-e it ?

Legit Mass Mail Getting Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Legit Mass Mail Getting Screwed

[!Squalus]

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?

Re:Legit Mass Mail Getting Screwed

[stephenbooth]

Can you prove that they subscribed? I mean really prove. That means either you have a physical piece of paper with their agreement to recieve your mail on it or - if it's an electronic sign up - the time, date, email address and IP address of them signing up; the time data and unique key value semnt to them in the confirmation email you sent to them (to the address subscribed); the time, date and IP address of when they used that unique key to confirm their subscription.

If you can't prove they subscribed then you can't prove you're not spamming.

Stephen

On spam

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Send our AOL cds to Spamers mailboxes!

[mabhatter654]

Could we sign up to have AOL "donate" our AOL CD's to the King spammer from eariler. That would kill 2 birds with 1 stone! I would be free of an aol cd [i do collect them for the boxes though] and the cd would go to the mailbox of a known spammer!

WE all WIN!

Doesn't it get boring after a while?

[Man In Black]

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.

Re:Doesn't it get boring after a while?

[Stuart Gibson]

In Soviet Russia, Slashdotted duplicate story servers mod YOU up.

Goblin

Re:Doesn't it get boring after a while?

[MattCohn.com]

Personally, I'm tired of seeing all the dupes and the servers go down! These people sell advertising/subscriptions, and seem to be under the illusion that they are a real company. If they are ever going to be more then just a bunch of drinking buddies with offices, then they will get their act together and learn a couple things about releasing a QUALITY product. Dupe notices alert the editors that the current level of profecionalism is unacceptable, and their audiance wont take it.

We do need a systems change though!

[mabhatter654]

I agree, but where do ISPs fit in? Someone has to throttle the pipe somewhere! ISPs don't want to for the very same reason. You'll notice that AOL [and Yahoo, MSN] is primarily a "content" provider not an ISP. The actual ISP part is usually contracted out to a local third party company city-by-city.

I'm in favor of system throttling rather than actually identifying spam. Allow a home/guest user to only send so many mails/so fast. If they exceed the limit then slow them down! That would be a system fix not dependant on knowlage of the individual mails! Businesses could pay for a higher limit to go with the higher bandwidth. The same could be applied with a basyen routine to most internet communication. Some one suddenly DOSing the same IP, slow um down--and notify the user of the error, Virus blasting mails all over, throttle it till it can be fixed! Work to build ISP systems that "know" their users habits. When the traffic is way off there would be a problem, rather than pulling the plug, slow it down & compare it to past usage then allow it to speed up again. Much better than restrictive TSAs and port-blocking!

Re:We do need a systems change though!

[Skapare]

And what if that ISP that takes the money doesn't do anything about the spam source? If the action to be taken is an action of law, then I certainly would agree that the action should be done against this ISP and not the backbone. But what if this bad ISP taking money from a spammer is outside the jurisdiction of the law? I would in this case consider it acceptable for the backbone ISP to be required to disconnect the bad ISP. Now what if this connection is actually a huge trunk going to another country, say for example the connection between a Caribbean Islands nation and the United States?

When it's a matter of law, I would say it can be done to control abuses (and not just spam ... include other things like DDoS attacks, etc), but must be done in a minimum way to manage and control the abuse. For example if that other nation out of reach of the law is only attacking one single network somewhere in the US, and the owner of that network wants to invoke the cut-off provisions, then it would be acceptable for the "cut off" to be in the form of a filter that prevents packets coming via that trunk only, addressed to that network, to be blocked. Of course if the ISP operating that connection decides it would rather take down the whole thing that deal with all the filters that would have to be added, that should be their option. The point is, if some network is being attacked, it should be the responsibility of the ISP (backbone or otherwise) closest to the source of the attack (where identifiable), within the jurisdiction of the applicable law where those outside fail to voluntarily do that action to clear up the attack, then the action must be taken to block that attack, and the law can only require the minimum amount of action necessary to block it.

One aspect of the spam problem is not unlike a DDoS. Imagine what the cost would be to service 1 billion SMTP connection attempts every day. That's 360 gigabytes of traffic every day (60 byte packet, 6 SYNs sent if no connection is established), or 33.333333 megabits every second (assuming it is evenly distributed in time). And that's just the bandwidth cost assuming spam is filtered at the router near the server (e.g. the SYNs never reach the server). Servicing 1 billion SMTP connections at the server involves all the bandwidth to carry out as much of the SMTP connection as the server allows before cutting it off, which can be substantially higher if the server allows the DATA portion to be transmitted. At 1 billion a day, that's 11,574 per second. That's a LOT of added servers just to deal with and refuse spam. And again, that assumes an even distribution in time.

One cracker who "owns" thousands of machines that can be used to attack some network with a DDoS attack can certainly cause a huge problem. But the aggregate of spam is just as much of a problem for large companies like AOL. We shouldn't treat it as any less of a problem because it's not one single individual causing it. We can't ignore the problem just because the perpetrators are many, or because they and their ISP might be out of reach of the jurisdiction of the victim.

Re:We do need a systems change though!

[Skapare]

The throttling should be done as close to the source as possible. The law should be applied only there. If an ISP is outside the jurisdiction of that law, then it should be applied at the nearest point crossing the jurisdictional border (e.g the connection going out of the country).

And the law should only require the necessary minimum stoppage. For example if the problem is a high speed packet attack from one source to one victim network, then it is acceptable for the victim's address to be used to filter packets at the connection, where practical to do so (maybe only if one or two victim networks in the case high bandwidth trunks, if that). But that's just a direct attack scenario, not a spam situation. For spam, the victims are generally everyone, so cutting off the sender regardless of the destination, or the whole trunk, may be necessary.

We need to treat spam like a DDoS problem, where the victims are simply wide spread rather than focused on a few. What if several hundred thousand connected computers were making as many connection attempts as they could to random addresses and port 80? That could be a lot of traffic. And we've seen that before.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Lemme get this straight...

[CrazyDuke]

How many would subscribe if one could tell the mods the post is a dupe before it is displayed to the rest of the peons? Hey, put the grammar and spelling nazis to work and have them fix the posts during that period, too.

Re:Bad Bad Bad

[ErikTheRed]

Case in point: What's currently going on with the Big Brother... errr... PATRIOT Act...sl

Major Differenence

[rf0]

I thinked you've picked up on the key point here of who brunts the cost of spam. If I receive a bit of snail-mail junk mail I know the cost has been taken on by the company. They've had to pay for the printing, packaging and delivery. Now I don't mind these and I can easily look at an envolope and decide if I want to open it

Spam mail on the other hand. Its costs me to receive it in that I pay, in a small part, for my ISP server's. They need new servers to handle the load they are going to get the money from my subscription. How much does it cost a spammer? Well I would guess not much more than the cost of their internet connection, in both sences of the word.

As a pointless statistic since Jan 14th I've recieved 3,500 spam which accounts for about 1% of the email I recieve

Rus

Re:Major Differenence

[BrokenHalo]

I can easily look at an envolope and decide if I want to open it

Sure you can. But it's much more fun to open it, take out the pre-paid envelope, shred all the other papers (or pad it with loo paper if you want, used or otherwise - take your pick), pack it all in the pre-paid envelope and send it back. :-)

Freedom of WHAT ???

[AftanGustur]

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 ..

Re:Bad Bad Bad

[realdpk]

Several so-called "backbone providers" host spammers directly. What then?

Re:Bad Bad Bad

[Dagmar d'Surreal]

My goodness, I hate to say it but you've got a rather slippery slope going here.

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. ...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.

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..." ...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.

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." ...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.

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.

Simple.

[raehl]

I initiate it. No one terminates it.

Re:Bad Bad Bad

[Skapare]

One of those ISPs that is not cutting off spammers is Rackspace. And their upstream backbone providers are not cutting them off, either. I'd love to see those bastards shut down and their officers put in prison.

How effective is spam?

[oz1cz]

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?

Quick, its a dupe

[RazzleDazzle]

lets all talk about how it's a dupe because that is so much more important and entertaining just like picking at pimples on my ass. Jeez, you'd think people take personal offense to a dupe story. It is a friggin website not a goddamn way of life... calm down, have some dip and enjoy the stories.... or go somewhere else.

Why not Class Action?

[dunng808]

IANAL, but I think AOL would make a stronger case with a class action lawsuit. Especially a strategy that solicits input from other ISPs. While I'm glad to see some action against spam, I think AOL has miscalculated the impact of making the action appear to be self promotion. Even if that was not their intent, it has that "look what we are doing" tone.

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?

Ye-freakin-HAW

[wowbagger]

Great - with both AOL and Symantec suing this moron, maybe the number spams I get for Symantec will go down!

Now, nuke all the elargement spams, credit spams, ....

Sigh. Well, there went that moment of elation.

Not filtering. Disconnection.

[wowbagger]

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.

Found at last

[andy1307]

Two good lawyers in the whole wide world. The iraqi lawyer who tipped off the Marines abour Jessica Lynch and the lawyer representing AOL in this case.

Commonly held principles

[DescData]

What I'm not hearing is some commonly held principles of what is misuse of e-mail and what measures are permitted or required to respond to such abuse.

I wish that all e-mail readers had a "Reject" button.
That each ISP passed the reject statistics up the pipeline.
If rejection statistics that show they are the source, the ISP should respond on by shutting down the perpetrators. Within minutes not years.
That ISP provided e-mail catalogs so that legitimate businesses had a legitimate way to reach new customers.

Even if your connection is flatrate

[Andy Dodd]

You're screwed. The cost is just being hidden from you as a part of your flatrate connection fee.

If it weren't for spam, people would likely be paying less per month for flatrate (for those who have flatrate connections.)

In the end, whether you can directly see it (metered connection) or not (flatrate connection), you're paying for the spam you receive.

Try some originality.

[Andy Dodd]

While it would be nice if AOL CDs were CD-RWs, there are more ways to reuse an AOL CD than simply trashing it or rewriting it a la the old AOL floppies (if they were rewritable, which they unfortunately aren't.)

While the CDs aren't rewritable, they have a lot more other uses than the old floppies did. Have some creativity.

2 AOL CDs + string + superglue = free Christmas tree ornament. (If you celebrate Christmas - If you don't, this is a starting point, I'm sure you can come up with something.) For added effect, add a microwave to that equation. The label side of AOL CDs may be ugly, but the data side is nice and shiny and has a built-in diffraction grating. :)

Re:Something is fundamentally wrong here

[Astrorunner]

Whoever modded me down as a troll obviously has no conception of what a troll is. RTFM,thankyouverymuch.

I hate to reply to myself, but...

[mhesseltine]

For the humor impaired, this is a joke. I don't bill people $100/hr for my services, and I wouldn't consider reading /. as billable anyway.

Is it really to the point where you have to explicitly tell someone something is meant to be humorous?

Try it without the law!

[mabhatter654]

Again, I'm proposing a system change without changing the law!

The key isn't cost, but time! Example: I probably only send a dozen emails a day tops, usually to only 1-5 people. My ISP should know that and if my machine suddenly cranks out a hundred messages to a thousand recipients, the server should automatically slow me down! Something's wrong here! Again, not just cut me off, but tie up my connection; forcing my connection to their server to be tied up for hours sending each message to each recipient one-at-a-time at 1K until their all sent. No stopping/reatarting to fool it!

For me at home it would be OK. I may have needed to email everyone at slashdot--I'd expect it to take a while, it's a one-time thing. But for a spammer it'd kill business! Spamming only works because you can send a long string of addresss at DSL speeds with one messsage that the server has to repeat for every address. My idea puts all the connecting and repeating on "your" machine. Of course, there would be threashholds, businesses would have a much higher limit than home users. Ideally, it would be a TOS thing. They'd just change software at the ISP's and anyone [other ISPs] who didn't play along gets blocked, cheaters get blocked...get the idea!

Also, it would allow the open relay to make a come back! Open relay does serve a purpose in the net world for travlers, lost systems, etc. the throttle program could be put in place to allow just so many messages a day thru open relay! The ISPs could jockey for a reasonable number and stomp anyone who doesn't fall in line! The same idea applies for DNS. ISP-side software shouldn't be qureing the root servers for stupid stuff. They should be learning the answers and not just sending 'garbage' upstream!

these are easily addressed open source and net community probems. AOL seems to be taking the first steps in this direction by simply rejecting those who don't show a valid server IP in the mail headders. Just like blackhole lists, it's really mean, maybe too mean, but it's necessary to do something. The worst thing to do is to wait for a law! We all know congress can't pass tech laws worth s$%.

Re:Try it without the law!

[Skapare]

You are suggesting a mail message rate quota. That's actually a good idea, if the ISP will do it. Few do. The question is what to do with an ISP that then refuses to play along. As you point out, they can be blocked. I do that already as do thousands of others. Then we face all the whiners citing unfairness, collateral damage, can't change ISP, etc.

The value of an open relay is almost nothing. The only thing I see it for is that very occaisional necessary anonymous email. Travelers no longer need it because all the major mail clients and server now can support authenticated SMTP. So just get an ISP that has a mail server with such support and use such a client, and you can email from anywhere. Be sure your ISP offers it on a port other than 25 because many ISPs don't let generic addresses (e.g. dialups and such) to access port 25 outside of their own network.

I'm not saying we need a law change. But I am saying we do end up having a law change, we should do it right. The risk of letting politicians do it without our "guidance" is foolhardy. The suggestions you make are good, and are already being done by many (at least the part about blocking ISPs that let spam leak out), and need to be done by more.

For Bob's sake...

[BrokenHalo]

There are more trees in the US now than there was 200 years ago

Come on, I always knew a lot of Americans were insular, but that has to be about the most ignorant statement I have seen (even on Slashdot, which is saying something) for a long time.

Am I right in assuming you are aware that there are other continents in this world? If not, I give up. However, if you are as educated as you claim, try taking a look at worldwide statistics for deforestation. I'm not talking about some piddly little "planted-for-political-kudos" little stand of trees the size of a tennis court in the US, I am talking about thousands of acres per day chopped down worldwide.

Sheesh.

AOL Sues Spammers

[Master Cougar]

How ironic, considering that we get spam from their users and when we send complaints to AOL, they ignore us.

Prevention

[iolkennyw]

SPAM is getting a lot of attention these days. Its good to see not only AOL and MSN but many of the little guys getting in the fight. Perhaps we will see some standards that work soon (hah). More likely SPAM will just reflect the reality of the junk mail we get via snail mail everyday. A white list works but is very restrictive and what about spoofing? The cat and mouse race continues (now introduce the dog). With complexity comes a simple reality. SPAM is here to stay and so are SPAM cops.