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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!"
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
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.
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/
...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
Online spam can't be opted out of, nor is there a cost to the spammer for sending it.
/.ers hate spam, but when AOL fights spam (by blocking netblocks and sueing spammers), most /.ers who are moderated up are against it.
I think the greater weirdness is how
So which is it? Do we support the largest ISP's action against spam, or do we suck up the spam?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
AOL is actually doing something that may result in the 'net becoming a better place? Talk about Shock and Awe! Alas, I seriously doubt it's out of the kindness of their corporate heart...more likely, it's because they're desperate to do something to improve the appearance of their customer service and corporate image.
My guess is that with 20 something million customers complaining and over a billion spam emails at your gate every day, composing 1/3 of the total email traffic, their reason is good business. Spam is raising their mail related IT expenses to be 1/3 more than they should be. It is costing them millions. If I owned AOL stock, I would want them to do this, to decrease costs, improve customer relations and lend more credibility to their own OPT in programs, thus make my stock worth more money. IMHO, AOL is conducting good business practices with this, and we are likely to see more of it.
Then again, I never thought AOL was evil. Lame, maybe. Laughable, sometimes. Self distructive, often. But not evil, naw. Big companies screw themselves without any help from us. But AOL is right on the money this time.
Its kinda like worrying about a cat being stuck in a tree. I mean, how many cat skeletons do you see stuck in trees?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
Okay, so Slashdot seems to get duplicate stories very often... some of their stuff may not always be newsworthy to everyone and so on... but doesn't it get old to repeatedly criticize them for it?
Personally, I'm tired of seeing jokes about how fast servers went down after a slashdotting, and how often dupes are posted, and I don't see why people keep modding them up. They're getting almost as old as the stupid Yakov Smirnov jokes.
Mod me down if you will, but please stop modding these up.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
Well, there is also the problem that a lot of us receive email from companies that CLAIM exactly what you are claiming - that we somehow signed on for their crap when we did not ever do that at all. So if you want to see a real difference in legitimate business email - then by God, poilce your own. I don't know of one of those "Unsubscribe" email links I would ever hit, because then the spam meisters would simply tag that as a legitimate e-mail address. SO you see, it's your own industry's damn fault for causing us all the unnecessary bandwidth hogging, lost productivity and other garbafge we don't want. I am so friggin' tired of the SPAM promoters eating up bandwidth and ISP's saying - "it ain't my fault" - that I would rather see a few SPAMMERS be strung up than have to deal with it everyday. Maybe then they might stop sending me the stupid pr0n, drugs, and mortgage emails. I don't need their stinking cable descramblers or stupid SystemWorks either and I sure as hell don't need no damn DRM enabled e-books either. SPAMMERS deserve to be sent up into space in the first "sun refueling rockets". It is their moral duty to burn. Sorry, I just don't see any legitimate way you can expect anyone to want to hit an unsubscribe link - people know that those lists are then sold to SPAMMERS. Get a new business maybe?
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
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.