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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!"
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
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.
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.