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Spammers Threaten Techdirt With Lawsuit
An anonymous reader writes "Found over at Declan McCullough's Politech, some spammers who had been written up in the NY Times found their contact info displayed on Techdirt, after they wrote about the NY Times story. Apparently, someone was trying to pull a Ralsky on the spammers. The spammers got pissed off and threatened to sue Techdirt - even though all the info was publicly available and other court cases have shown it's legal to post spammer's contact information. Techdirt, interestingly, took the contact info down because they feel that no one should get spammed. I'm kind of torn on this one. On the one hand, I respect Techdirt for taking such a stand, but on the other, I feel that the spammers clearly deserve to be spammed back. The fact that they threatened Techdirt, despite them not having done anything wrong (it wasn't even the folks at Techdirt who posted the info - but some readers), makes me even angrier at the spammer."
So, just out of idle curiosity you understand, who were these spammers that threatened the legal action?
I thought that the war for all the bases wasn't scheduled to start until A.D. 2101...
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Then we start on the ears!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
What's wrong with showing their contact information to everybody?
For instance, I would benefit those rich guys so much by offering some business opportunity in Nigeria I'm into.
Ah, praise the lord for those helping guys, always wanting to inform you about the latest and greatest offers, and refusing to accept anything in exchange...
Which is why we should all ditch the WWW and go back to USENET and BBSs.
I say posting their personal emails all over the place would be a good start. Imagine the irony of accidentally crapflooding yourself.
It'd be hilarious for two weeks until they exclude their own emails in the scripts they use. But then ISPs could red-flag anyone who recieves very low amounts of mail as under suspicion.
Agreed, two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do...
alyx@netglobalmarketing.com Maybe we should find out. Maybe we should help the person at this address find some great deals on genetalia enhancement or how to make money fast! Perhaps they can use a college degree!
Thankfully, they'll be able to enlarge their penises (penii? :) one to three inches with the new herbal supplement they're e-mailing each other about.
They that would sacrifice their
Score:5, Offtopic
Okay everybody, the game is over and JessLeah is the winner. Slashdot will now be closed.
LAST POST!
So I'm a pervert. Welcome to the Internet.
If the whole world acted upon "an eye for an eye" then everyone would be blind.
Ah, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man
is king!
Moral? You get one eye poked out, hide out and wait
for the poking to stop, then declare yourself king.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
You wouldn't happen to owe the *AA $98 billion would you?
Great.
Now I'm envisioning the commercials with the Bambi-eyed teenagers saying "I helped waste bandwidth"... "I helped clog thousands of mail servers worldwide"... "I helped send penis enlargement ads to my grandmother".
"Where do spammers get their money? If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you."
shudder
Thanks.
Just read the article you linked about Alyx Sachs and her cohort. To quote her:
"These antispammers should get a life," she said. "Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?"
By contrast, she said, "70 million people have bad credit. Guess what? Now I can't get mail through to them to help them."
Did anyone else reading that feel a powerful compulsion to punch her in the face? As someone who recieves anything up to 200 pieces of spam a DAY now, I know I did.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Excellent... just signed her up for several catalogs. One of which they said "don't send out free catalogs". I hope everybody is doing the same. That anonymizer.com account sure comes in handy now. :-)
google is your friend
heh, heh.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Um, yes? Premeditated murder is one of those things that most civilized societies prefer not to condone. (Save for when approved by the state in times of war, or when commited by the U.S. 'corrections' system.) Talk about a disproportionate response. Spammers are really, really, really annoying, and they're thieves without question--but we stopped hanging thieves more than a century ago.
On the other hand, maybe if someone just gave a spammer a really good beating, I could let that slide...
~Idarubicin
Thanks!
Congratulations Alyxsandra and Albert. You succeeded in getting your contact info taken down from Techdirt, where maybe 1400 people saw it. Unfortunately, now it's Modded to +5 on Slashdot, and a good 140,000 people are probably looking at it. And taking action already.
Congratulations on your intelligence. On the other hand, I guess if you were smart, you might not have to be a spammer for a living.
This all reminds me of an episode of Seinfeld in which a telemarketer calls Jerry during dinner. Jerry: Well actually I'm kinda busy right now, why don't you give me your home telephone number, and I'll call you back. Telemarketer: We're not allowed to give out our home numbers. Jerry: Why not? Telemarketer: We don't want people calling us at home. Jerry: [hanging up the phone] Exactly! Now that's poetic.
Speak for yourself.