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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."
Then you risk the lawsuit. We all know what American justice is like. I'm not suprised at all, and their decision (to pull the info) has nothing to do with morality, or right and wrong, just common sense.
they feel that no one should get spammed
How very naive of them. Why shouldn't the people that force us to take extreme measures for a little bit of privacy, convenience, not be made to deal with the same garbage that we do?
tinfoilmedia
it would be great if someone posted their addresses here - talk about going from bad to worse... i'd rather be flooded by the techdirt- than the slashdot crowd ;-)
Or as Ghandi said, after awhile, an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I agree with you, but compare this to the situation in the past : 100 years ago, we had the same issue with industrialists. 200 years ago with big farmers vs small farmers. 300 years ago with big guns vs small guns.
Don't pretend this to be the disease of the 21st century just because we're using the law instead of money or guns. And then again, the laws have always been bent by the guys in charge.
While i don't approve of it, it seems to be the nature of the human beast. It's amazing how we haven't exterminated ourselves.
As a side note : i find the way Berlusconi is CEO of Italy far more frightening than what the US is doing. After all, we europeans excpect US politicians to be puppets in the hands of the big corporations. But Berlusconi is a whole other matter.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
"Let me spam in peace," or
"I hate spam, please let me spam you"
> If somebody punches you, do you punch them straight back? :)
That depends if he has friends with guns.
> Do you think doing so would leave you with any credibility?
Depends.
So a burgular breaks in and punches you. You beat him up enough so that he flees. The wife is happy because now your home is safe. You gained credibility for not being a wimp.
Law is not supposed to grant retribution.
The law should protect the society by preventing people from harming the collective and not cater to the base human instincts like the hunger for revenge.
BOO! TERRO
Plain and simple spammers are scum. They steal, in terms of using open relay servers and other peoples bandwidth. The lie in that 99.9% of the things they sell don't work. They cheat in trying to hide information. Also taking the amount of spam I get can make it really hard to filter the good from the bad even with filtering each and every message
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The issue here is your "comfort zone." If you, a geek, start talking tech in a threatening way to your techno-phobe neighbor, he's not going to argue with you or try to fight back. He's out of his element. Same with a geek who is being intimidated by someone who is law-savvy. We tend to cringe, apologize and hope they go away. The fact that they might be able to hurt us financially makes us take their threats seriously. If they did the same thing to a lawyer they would probably get a far different response.
Think about it - you and you neighbor have a little spat about a fence or a barking dog or something. You threaten to "route his Roadrunner connection through your proxy sniffer and VPN his DoS to every kiddie-porn site in the country." Imagine the expression on his face. What are his options? Hire a techie to defend himself? That costs money. He doesn't even understand what you said, except that it sounds bad and you sound serious. He's gonna fold.What we really need to do to stop this legal-bullying is to get more familiar with the law.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
If this is indeed how americans view their legal system, then I think it's time for them (you) to do something to change it.
It's one thing that your only measure of quality of life is wealth, another one entirely that relative amount of money is the only thing separating right from wrong. While the judicial system is no absolute in right vs. wrong in theory, it is in practice.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
It's mighty easy for someone (an American or otherwise) to throw that idea around, and terribly difficult to actually make it a reality.
The sad fact of the matter is that there hasn't been an effective widespread protest movement since the '60s here in the US. And there won't be any time soon.
The apathy of the American population is growing, not shrinking. Attempting to motivate them to protest anything at all is an exercise in futility.
Not to be a pessimist, but... that's how I see it. YMMV.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
What would you do, Mr. Idealist? Stand there and take it while saying, "Please don't do that!"?
Some people have suffered that same plight often enough to a) start thinking it's normal and b) take pride in it...quite often it starts in school gyms for one reason or another.
For those who are either young enough to still be in school or old enough to have kids in school already...yes, it is ok to hit back, and it's even better to give the other kid taking a beating a hand. Standing next to it and looking at it with a stupid grin only shows the fact we're still apes, just with a little less hair...most of us, in any case...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
at the risk of being flamebait
after your scenario happened once or twice, I think we would see a dramatic reduction in spam.
I'm actually surprised that there hasn't been a case of spammer lynching as yet.
Like most people the only thing that keeps me from doing it is the thought of spending 30 years in prison. Not worth taking the chance of getting a couple of fellow rabid anti-spammers to sit on your jury.
That said, if you were sitting on a jury for the trial of someone who killed a spammer, would you vote for conviction?
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
OK, if spammers get their knickers in a twist and some have ethical issues with posting that information, do the next best thing:
Create and post a HOWTO showing how to find the information yourself. You can't find everyone on Google and unless you want to pay a service $$$, there is an art to finding someone's meatspace info.
No, we have to go after both. What you suggest is something like going after the person who hired an assassin and leave the assassin go free because he was doing it for the money.
I know this isn't a very good analogy, but the point is: Everybody involved in commiting a crime should suffer the consequences. Not just who paid for it.
If it pisses the spammers off to the point they see the light and quit spamming, it sure as hell DOES benefit sosiety!
Leviticus 24:19 If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him: 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. 21 Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death.
Deut 19:16 If a malicious witness takes the stand to accuse a man of a crime, 17 the two men involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the LORD before the priests and the judges who are in office at the time. 18 The judges must make a thorough investigation, and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against his brother, 19 then do to him as he intended to do to his brother. You must purge the evil from among you. 20 The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you. 21 Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
New Testament reference: Matthew 5:38 "You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.'[7] 39But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
The nature of the "eye for eye" in the OT was not one of personal revenge, but of defining appropriate punishments to be handed down by lawful authorities (i.e., the courts). What Jesus was referring to was the idea of taking the law into your own hands, and doing it out of a sense of revenge (justice's ugly cousin). It is also interesting that the OT seems to have the harshest words for people who commit perjury.
The apathy of the American population is growing, not shrinking. Attempting to motivate them to protest anything at all is an exercise in futility.
I disagree, the problem is not apathy but how out of touch the wanna-be protest organizers are with America.
Of course anti-war protesters, many of whom cut their teeth in the 60's, couldn't mobilize America as well as they would have liked. Most of America saw right through their outrageous lies and bombastic rhetoric. (Hint: No matter how many times you saw it, you will not be convincing the public that Bush is a Nazi. Just ain't gonna happen.) The wanna-be protesters were so out of touch with reality that even many genuinely anti-war people wouldn't be caught dead at one of their abortive rallies; just because you're anti-war doesn't mean you want to be seen protesting next to the communist* party, white supremecists, or anti-Semites. (I wish I was exaggerating, but those groups made up a large portion, if not the majority, of the protesters you saw, and they were responsible for organizing nearly %100 of them. This is documented, so if you disagree with me, go look it up, read the facts, and change your mind.)
On the other hand, convincing people of something legitimate, such as over-powerful corporations, might not be so difficult if you can concentrate correctly on just that issue and resist letting the toxic leftists participate, and promptly hijacking the platform and turning it into just more leftist noise to the people of America. ("The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is very untrue; start thinking that way and your enemy's enemy will do more damage to you then whom you are technically against.)
It's also worth pointing out that protests should be seen solely as a vehicle for getting onto the news and communicating with the people, to make your issue an issue in the next election. By and large, protests are a weak forum to actually get anything done, they're much more useful as agenda-setters. (For instance, while protests may have given dark-skinned people official civil rights equality, look how many protests it took. Each protest did not accomplish much, for protests to effect direct action it takes a lot of them... and it did take a lot of them, big ones at that.)
And you must always be willing to face the possibility that no, the people aren't on your side and they just plain disagree with you, not because of apathy or any other frankly insulting ideas like that. This is another thing that wanna-be protesters seem to have a problem with.
Frankly, until the 60's-era wanna-be protesters are bumped out of the position of organizing these things, and some more realistic folks start organizing on some more tightly focused issues, the protest movement will remain dead. I wouldn't mind participating in an anti-corporate power movement, but if you want my help it's going to have to be focussed. I won't demonstrate next to Communists, anti-Semites, or white supremecists, and I won't demonstrate on a flat anti-corporation platform either; corporations aren't inherently evil, it's their protection on equals as people and their excessive power that's bad, not the idea of people grouping together and trying to make money.
*: By the way, if you've made it this far into the twenty-first century and unless you've been totally blinded by their rhetoric, you should realize that communists belong right next to the anti-Semites and white supremecists on the evil scale. At the beginning of the 20th century one could be an honest communist without being evil, but advocating a political system with a cumulative death toll in the hundreds of millions is just evil now. Whatever accusations those people might be legitimately able to lay at the feet of capitalism absolutely pale in comparision to what their political philosophy is directly and undeniably responsible for. If they were halfway honest people they'd be protesting against Communism themselves. If the US government directly killed as many of its own citizens as Communism has, the US would be dangerously close to completely unpopulated...
Seriously, these people are assholes. If something like that happened, just a few times, I bet Spam would go down a lot. I wouldn't like to see their wives or children hurt, though.
What I'd really like would be to see these guys thrown in jail. Most of these people are "hackers" at least, and could probably charged under the PATRIOT act for 'cyber terrorism' or something, if the government actually gave a shit...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We tell the kids, "Never throw the first punch, always throw the last one."
Note that we use the verb, 'throw' and not 'land'. There is, of course, no need for the guy swinging at you to connect with your nose before you take action.