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Spammers Sue Anti-Spam Groups
SuperBanana writes "The Register reports in a story today that spammers have banded together under the name EmarketersAmerica.org to sue various anti-spam groups- days before a large conference on spam hosted by the FTC(which will be attended by many spammers). Anti-spam groups think the timing is not by coincidence, but believe the move may backfire because they will be able to countersue and get access to spammer's internal documents. By the way, if you're wondering who these guys are, check out Spamhaus's directory of top spammers."
GREAT!!! nOw i know what organization to send the bill to for all this crap about giant penises wanting my credit card. PLus, now we all know where to forward our spam to!!! FANTASTIC!!!!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Assuming there are such, as it's currently being hit with a DoS. I think it's the first time a website has deserved a /.'ing.
It wouldn't really matter anyway, some other people would simply step up to fill in the void. .45 caliber handgun and about 180 loud bangs. Most of the anti-spam groups seem to view spam as equivilent to rape.
As for what, "spirited off internet" means, I think it involves a
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
They ARE raping our inboxes! We never consented to allow them to fill our E-mail inboxes with their penis enlargement spam, let alone without the protection afforded by the "ADV:" tag!
:= OFF
/.. We should be able to harrass them endlessly and make their signal:noise ratio equivilant to ours.
Anti_spam_fanatic_mode
I hope that someone finds the personal info of those 180 people and posts it here on
However, if we did that, then we would be no better than they are. Perhaps a more effective thing to do would be to sign our governmental representatives up for every E-mail mass marketing campaign there is and do so with the name of one of the 180 spammers. That wouldn't be too hard.
Plus, we could always claim that a nasty virus did it.
Think about this the next time you advocate centralizing the Net (in terms of SMTP) on large ISPs in order to "solve" the problem of residental users spewing spam (directly or by relay).
The residential users are annoying because there are so many of them, but if, 10 years from now, the only way you can send mail is to relay through a large ISP's mail servers... who do you think said ISP's best business partners will be?
For an answer to that question look to the US Postal Service's largest customers: The US Federal Government and bulk mailers.
THAT is exactly the business niche that spammers are evolving into. All they need is for users to have slightly less choice and ISPs to have slightly more power to tell their users how the Internet works rather than the other way around.
Push to keep the Internet a network of peers while establishing a system of identity, trust and responsibility (which should in turn also by non-centralized, but rooted on an arbitrary number of certificate authorities and trust databases), and you will do yourself and the rest of the world a large favor!
Okay, I read the first few pages of the lawsuit, and then I couldnt stomach the legalese anymore... I'm not a lawyer, after all...
anyway, the way it sounds is that they are being sued because they sell products/list information that people use to stop the flow of "crap" from these companies. From what I read, they didnt attack these companies, they didnt DoS them, they merely provided tools that people could use to stop spammers from contacting them.
The people that are using these tools probably never would have purchased anything from them anyway, and if they are like most of us, the emails are blocked/auto deleted/instantly trashed when they do get through, so its a moot point anyway.
I think these people are just ticked off because their scummy business is being threatened by people who are intelligent enough to "work the internet", not just "use" it.
thats just my thoughts, I could be wrong...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
You mean tabacco companies suing people producing anti-smoking ads don't you?
Spam exists because it is profitable. If we each dedicate just ten minutes a day to order free product literature, tie up spammer's toll-free numbers, or even order a spammer's product on behalf of another spammer, we can cause spam to become unprofitable.
We know which companies sell their email listings, right?
More than a few of us can write a script...
A clandestine server running in an undisclosed location--perhaps a public wireless hotspot--can go forever properly filling out the forms of these companies with complete and total gibberish.
It won't crash servers... nobody will even know until it's pretty much too late and the offended databases are loaded with utter garbage.
Recently, I wrote about passively doing this to spambots. I keep the page on the server for good measure.
My tech articles are geared to a nontech audience so don't give me crap if they sound lame. I don't preach to the choir except when hanging out at Slashdot.
That said, I don't see why this concept can't be expanded. They have no defense against form scripts.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Sounds like a good idea, but how do you CC someone? What about mailing lists?
Explain that to me. NASCAR is stock cars, right? I really don't have a clue, but I assume that means they're in some way, you know, stock? I'm sure they do some stuff to them, but I'd think you'd watch F1 if you wanted to hear about ridiculously insane car technology. Is it just that NASCAR promotes a lot and gets on more often?
I watch both, since the wwwwAAAAOOOOmmmmm stuff and the droning anouncers in the background help me concentrate on boring stuff for some reason, but I never got actually following it like a sport. The rules make all the cars basically the same, so it always seemed to me like a contest to see who can deviate from the ideal race the least. Like competetive video games.
2% of the emails you buy will be viewed (viewed meaning that someone actually generated an http request based on the HTML inside)
And I'm NEVER one of the 2% as I have external images in email turned off thanks to Mozilla. A lot of spammers will use images to gerneate and http request, thereby allowing them to track who views what messages. I'm a much happier camper since I turned off external images and installed spamassassin, although a lot more junk has been slipping by spamassassin now since I first installed it awhile back. It's still a godsend tho.
Yes, it's much easier to come up with a dumb idea without having to think the whole thing through first.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
When the laws are reformed so that the "cost of spam" includes 2-5 as the Bride of Bubba, then it will become unprofitable -- it doesn't bring in the kind of money that will get people to accept that level of risk (unlike, for example, the illegal drug trade).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
It says something about our crappy legal system that total crap like this can even be introduced into a court. There should be a pre-trial hearing to determine if something's even worthy of appearing in a court. No fancy legal bullshit, just some guy who looks at something and says, "that's fucking bullshit...trash can". Like the McD's coffee lawsuite, this is fucking bullshit and should have been trashed by the court clerks upon receiving it.
blacklisting IP addresses of the plaintiffs
No-one has to use these blacklists. They can and have the right to blacklist anyone for any damn reason they choose. If individual's don't like their blacklisting policies, they can use a different blacklist. The fact is, these guys deserve to be blacklisted.
libel
Hahahhahahahahahahah. For something to be libel, it has to false. Every claim made about these slimebags is completely true. Period. End of discussion. In fact, these spammers need to be prosecuted for frauid: none of that crap you see in e-mails is true. It's all fraudulent.
invasion of privacy
Hahahahahah. If you send out thousands of e-mails a day, your e-mail address and contact information are not private. In fact, your e-mail address, phone number, or house number do not get the protection of privacy. That is all public information. Even if this claim was true, there are no penalties for invasion of privacy of the kind they could possibly be referrign to.
the publication of allegedly false information
Bullshit.
"intentionally interference with a contract"
Bullshit. No-one who has received SPAM had a contract with the spammer to receive it. Period. End of discussion.
This crap should have been trashed by the clerks who received it, and these guys should have been fined a hundred thousand dollars for wasting the court's time.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The spam blockers are selling/giving away a tool that lets system administrators and individual users ignore messages that they do not wish to receive. If I started a doorbell-removal business, would certain religious groups sue me for ruining their business?
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
DOS, schmoss. Why the hell aren't each and every one of the spammers' filter-evasion tricks prosecutable under the computer-cracking laws, as they are clearly deliberate actions aimed at bypassing the access security placed on a computer by its owner?
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
- This is an amazing comment on the ineffectiveness of spam.
Only if you don't complete the math. I haven't priced a spam-campaign, personally, but I have seen adverts for software you can "run from home" that retail for as little $75.So let's play a numbers game. Let's suppose I want to sell narfing-irons. I can manufacture them cheaply in India, so I have a good supply, and can make a 60% profit if I sell them for $35 a pair. I want to use a spam campaign, because I know how effective they are. I buy a service for $350, and they will send spam out to 4 million addresses. Just 2% will result in page views. That's 80,000 hits. Let's assume we get a sales rate of .5%. That's right, one-half of one percent. That's 400 sales. Or, total revenues of $14,000. Around $8000 of that is profit, from which my $350 spam-campaign is taken.
And that was only one run of spam. If I run, say, 10 or 12 campaigns from different services, with similar rates of return, my narfing-iron business will net me in the vicinity of $80K-$100K in profit from Internet-based sales alone. And I didn't lift a finger, other than to ship the product.
NOW do you see where they get people who will pay for this service?
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
They make money from it. If they did 'magically' disapear, then 180 more would replace them and make they money they were making.
The spammers are bad, but they are only permitted to be so by those that pay them. If we stop those that pay them, there'd be a whole lot less spam. [a bit like the war on drugs, drug lords replace killed drug lords... but at the end of the day if there we could stop the addicts being the addicts there'd be no drug lords... a bit circular].
Of course, removing the source is not easy.
Because, although many in government have joked about Al Gore inventing the internet, the current crop in the US House and Senate have have very few among them who understand the problems, and fewer still who seem interested in doing anything about it. As I see it, most are dealing with problems brought to their attention by campaign donors or people highly motivated to remove them from office if they don't do something particular to their state or district. Though spam is a world-wide problem, they don't see it as important. There are laws which cover wire-fraud and such, but most people scammed are too embarassed or don't know their options well enough to do anything.
If you campaigned for office in my district and/or state, chances are you rattle on about social security, abortion, school funding, etc. If you did show up and I had the time to attend your rally, you'd get an earful from me about what a major pain this spam is and how its about time the Cybersecurity Czar or someone started knocking skulls. Unfortunately, most of the other people there would think I'm some nut and that spam isn't as important as the other issues. IMHO that pretty much explains the way it is.
BTW I was getting 30-40 spams a day back in November, 2002. A month ago it was up to about 120. Currently I'm getting about 180, during 1 hour break for lunch, today, I received 43 pieces. It seems to come in barrages, so I'm pretty convinced it's like Alan Ralsky just fired off his next pile of fetid crap and is getting ready for the next issue, probably about 8PM tonight.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why on earth would these guys demand a jury? They'd be better off with an old judge that never uses a computer.... not a jury of American people that hate spam almost as much as we do.
Proof that spammers are stupid, I guess. Either that or they honestly believe that the American public wants their penis enlargment pills.
It's the idea of all this legal action over internet behavior that scares me. I'd rather the network were a giant, dangerous wasteland... than the over-legislated political mess that it is. I'd rather find ways to block spam, than make more laws. I'd rather have to institute functional security measures, than see everyone who scans a subnet get arrested. I'd also rather people made better protection systems, than prosecuting the people that beat them.
That's how we got in this mess in the first place: Fear and hatred are much the same thing.. in the regimen of the 'fight or flight' syndrome, hatred is the 'fight' response over a long period of time. If the whole world fears America and only 1 in 1000 turns that into hatred, that means that there are about 6million people who want to blow the country up. Only one of them needs to succeed.
Sleep tight.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Just like, if we prosecute all the drug dealers, the amount of drugs on the streets will drop?
Ummm... no, not really.
First of all, this is just a mathematical statement about the number of spammers that are responsible for 99% of the spam you receive. It isn't some sort of guide for public policy, which was my point.
Also, when we prosecute drug dealers we create a vacuum in the market that is quickly filled with more entrepreneurs. Soon every street corner is spoken for. If we were to stop prosecuting them, the market would quickly saturate and the price of drugs would fall, decreasing the profit motive.
There is no mechanism like that for spam. An existing spammer population doesn't deter more spammers from entering the "occupation"- until everyone just gives up on email. That hasn't quite happened yet.