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AOL Sues Spammers
mabu writes "Prompted by what they're reporting as over eight million complaints and the result of over a billion inbound junk e-mails, according to this press release, America Online is now stepping up its battle against spam by initiating five lawsuits against over a dozen companies and individuals. Let's hope this is the beginning of a more aggressive effort on the part of ISPs to prove to their users that they are seriously interested in addressing this issue, and at its source. I've maintained that this has never been a freedom of speech issue. It's more an issue of mail relay hijacking, forging header information, and exploiting third-party networks and resources. Perhaps if more ISPs took action, we might see the backbone providers doing so as well?"
"You've got a summons!"
I think?
Argh!!!! Who do we hate more?! Spammers or AOL? Thank goodness MS isn't involved in this story or I'd be really perplexed.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Didn't we see this earlier today?
Or are AOL stories like AOL CD's...
Dupe!
Hmm...
Spam tacos...
or Spam burgers?
Duplicate spam burgers! Twins!
Hahaha!
Location: Mt. Xinu
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!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Can I sue AOL for spamming me with CDs and floppy disks for the last decade?
Update: (some future date) by T: Yes, it's a dupe.
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
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.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
If a company pays a spammer and but can risk being sued then they will think twice before paying them to spam. They will look for more ethical ways to advertise their products. This will kill spam dead more then any laws or regulations because it will hit the spammers at their wallets. If they have no customers then they are out of bussiness.
Even if the spammers get away and forge like hell the FBI or the ISP can just go after the company paying the spammer instead. Nice.
http://saveie6.com/
Let Ralsky be amoung the sued!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
...it is a 'parallel post'.
Read my journal - the most recent entry as of this writing is about my writing to Linux Journal and raising the point that Rackspace (who has been taking out full page ads in LJ) are very spam friendly.
In my journal, one person responded about her experiences as a Rackspace customer.
One thing we can do is to make it VERY public that places like Rackspace, Verio, UUNET etc. are unwilling to do anything to enforce their own Terms Of Service against spam. Granted, if you follow the various anti-spamming news groups you will know this, but most PHBs don't follow the anti-spamming newsgroups.
But if LJ gets flooded with people calling RackedWaste to task, then it is possible that it might catch the eye of potential SpamSpace customers. Who knows? It might even catch the eye of the marketing group at SpamWaste and they might, just might, start pushing to enforce their TOS.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I was noodling around this spam problem and was thinking that maybe somebody who isn't me might write a little program, something that looks like SETI, but isn't...this little sucker allows you to participate in a voluntary DDOS attack on a spammer(s). Said program might verify that the "to be attacked" address was in a known spam database, or something like that. Problems:
:)
1. How do we know the target of the attack is genuinely a dick?
2. How do we know we have the _right_ target addresses?
3. Who initiates the attack? Who terminates it?
I think those are solvable problems. This doesn't have to be a single mechanism, either.
We are many. They are few. No spammer/complicitor could withstand a deliberate DDOS that didn't end, and was voluntary.
A DDOS arms race out there on the internet is something that will happen sooner or later.
Is this illegal? Hey, we are just sending them a few bytes of information. They can just hit the delete key if they don't want it.
Please beat up this idea. I'm sure it's been posted before.
Would there be some good way to have people identify dupes? Maybe a link on every article [Report Dupe], and then maybe based on some sort of calculation of their karma + quality of their past moderation + the number of those who click on 'Report Dupe', that the story gets a 'Dupe Rating' and can then be filtered automatically for those who have 'ignore dupes past this threshold' selected in what stories they see?
How difficult might that be to implement?
Any discussion on something like that?
I dunno, just a thought..
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
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
...ten zillion "free" AOLSummons CDs clogging up spammers' mailboxes and stuffed in their magazines. All AOL has to do is what they know best...
Online spam can't be opted out of, nor is there a cost to the spammer for sending it.
/.ers hate spam, but when AOL fights spam (by blocking netblocks and sueing spammers), most /.ers who are moderated up are against it.
I think the greater weirdness is how
So which is it? Do we support the largest ISP's action against spam, or do we suck up the spam?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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?
AOL is actually doing something that may result in the 'net becoming a better place? Talk about Shock and Awe! Alas, I seriously doubt it's out of the kindness of their corporate heart...more likely, it's because they're desperate to do something to improve the appearance of their customer service and corporate image.
My guess is that with 20 something million customers complaining and over a billion spam emails at your gate every day, composing 1/3 of the total email traffic, their reason is good business. Spam is raising their mail related IT expenses to be 1/3 more than they should be. It is costing them millions. If I owned AOL stock, I would want them to do this, to decrease costs, improve customer relations and lend more credibility to their own OPT in programs, thus make my stock worth more money. IMHO, AOL is conducting good business practices with this, and we are likely to see more of it.
Then again, I never thought AOL was evil. Lame, maybe. Laughable, sometimes. Self distructive, often. But not evil, naw. Big companies screw themselves without any help from us. But AOL is right on the money this time.
Its kinda like worrying about a cat being stuck in a tree. I mean, how many cat skeletons do you see stuck in trees?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
>>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.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
One of the defendants would appear to be one of the myriad pirated Norton/Symantec spammers (George Moore, Maryland Internet Marketing of Maryland, and 14 of their advertising affiliates. Spam Content: software products (www.getnortonhere.net))
Question: could/would Symantec join in this suit, or better still bring copyright violation and (ahem)piracy charges against this fool?
I have long held the belief that Symantec does not more aggressively crack down on all the Norton spammers because once somebody has purchased an unauthorized copy of Norton, they will have to pay Symantec for updates. Thus, Symantec makes money on the subscription fees and doesn't have to mess around with actually making a disk, printing a manual, etc.
www.eFax.com are spammers
8 million complaints, huh? Well now...I have a problem with that number. As many of you may know, AOL counts ANY type of signup to their service as an official member. (This is how they have 10 billion members...or whatever it is.) They even keep cancelled accounts! ...so...based on that logic...
;-)
8 Million Complaints (as reported by AOL)
- 1 Million Complaints being submitted twice (because AOLers barely know what they are doing)
- 1 Million E-mails sent 'cause 13 year old males like to see if they can ruin some poor bastard's life who has to sift through this mail
- 2 million E-mails that were sent 10 years ago, but AOL didn't bother to read them then because they didn't care about spam (but they have decided to count them now)
- 3.7 million e-mails that were sent to AOL's complaint account by spammers trying to spam said account
= 300,000 valid complaint e-mails
Yes, that sounds better.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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.
.. for more than two business quarters: -2 .. but you have to actually pay for it: -3 .. specifically, non-extradition countries: -3
CEO has visible body piercings: +1
Company is profitable: +1
They make something you like: +2
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
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.
I thought on Tuesdays we were supposed to hate AOL, and love the little ISPs.
Did somebody change the /. calendar again on me?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
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...
Okay, so Slashdot seems to get duplicate stories very often... some of their stuff may not always be newsworthy to everyone and so on... but doesn't it get old to repeatedly criticize them for it?
Personally, I'm tired of seeing jokes about how fast servers went down after a slashdotting, and how often dupes are posted, and I don't see why people keep modding them up. They're getting almost as old as the stupid Yakov Smirnov jokes.
Mod me down if you will, but please stop modding these up.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
Has anyone realy seriously claimed that SPAM was a freedom of speech issue ?
That's rediculeus...
With Spam, nobody gives his concent except the Spammer.. Claiming that Spam is a "Freedom of speech" issue is like claiming that Rape is a "Freedom of Sex" issue ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
My goodness, I hate to say it but you've got a rather slippery slope going here.
...and by the time enough evidence has been gathered for a provider to order one of their downstreamers "Stop that twit or ELSE", the spammer has usually gotten a contract with another facility. ...plus, in case you haven't noticed, a whole fsckton of spam is now coming through overseas servers for companies operating domestically. When was the last time you tried to get a spammer run out of anything operating in China or Korea? Peering points between nations aren't so easily severed, nor would it be useful to do something so coarsely grained.
...has already occurred. The FBI has been monitoring NNTP, SMTP, IRC, and HTTP activity at major peering points across the nation for over a year now.
...the political "unacceptability" has been the case for quite some time. The only reason the terrorism boojum hasn't caused it to be made explicitly illegal is that there are definite free speech issues preventing such from happening. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard the "kidnappers use crypto" argument, I don't think I'd need a job.
Most backbone providers DO currently take action against spammers, although some more than others. Typically this does not involve anything so delicate as filtering for spam traffic, but outright cutting the wankers off the network which is far more likely to be effective. I've actually been party to one incident where a phone call to a backbone provider at an opportune moment made a spammer, his ISP, and their ISP disappear off the face of the net with the perfectly reasonable assumption that a complete lack of packets makes news about neglected portions of an AUP travel fastest. The major problem with whacking spammers is the same with killing cockroaches with a shoe. Smash 10 and there's 100 more hiding under the cupboards waiting for the lights to go out.
The approach AOL is taking is actually rather likely to be effective. Most of these spammers are sketchy little fly-by-nights and LLCs that even suing into oblivion wouldn't stop. The day after filing bankruptcy for their previous name, they'll just reincorporate in a different office with a different name for a cost less than the money they'd make for one spamming job. The majority of the small businesses paying for advertising on the other hand need a little more fiscal momentum than a 3U rack rental to survive. Make it clear to them that there's a good chance some mega-corp is liable to sue them crosseyed if they make use of a spammer for advertising, and suddenly they'll get a lot more choosy about who they do business with.
However, in case you haven't noticed...
"(b) The legislature, judicary, and executive branches of government coupled with industry and useful idiot consumers will require that traffic also be screened for other "bad data" - terrorist materials, copyrighted works, anti-American speech, evidence of criminal activity, financial data, medical data, and much more, and..."
and:
"(c) the banning of encryption as we know it, since the conscentious masses will turn to it for day-to-day traffic, which will be politically unacceptable to those in power."
However, give it another ten years by which time failing to reduce the spam problem through civil measures will be likely to have actually encouraged people to call for government intervention, and then you'll see non-escrowed strong cryptography start to become explicitly illegal for domestic use--in the interests of preventing terrorism, of course.
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?
Can someone familiar with legal matters explain the strategy of filing three of the five suits against unknown people at unknown locations? Is it a matter of discovery?
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Most people who want the backbone providers to "do something" about spam don't want the backbone providers to filter.
They want the backbone providers to pull the plug on the mainsleaze spammers directly connected to them.
They want the backbone providers to insist that the Tier-(N+1:N>=1) providers to enforce their TOS. Failing that, they want the backbone providers to pull the plug on those who support spamming.
www.eFax.com are spammers