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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."
It's very much like capital punishment, or the "eye for an eye" rule in the Old Testament. The normal way out of this connundrum is a follows: What makes a certain act wrong, normally, is that a party without the proper authority does it. I.e., it's more OK for a judge to send someone to jail than for you to. Same thing in the Old Testament. You can't just go around killing other people, unless it's doing so to uphold a law established by God. So in this spamming scenario? If it's not breaking the law, then retribution at *least* seems just.
...that all it takes to bring virtually any effort to a screeching halt is for somebody with more money than you to threaten a lawsuit. At that point, whammo, you have to stop what you're doing.
When you are a small site, or an individual person without a tremendous income (read: everyone short of a CEO), that basically means "any company, or even individual, can threaten to sue you, and there goes whatever you were working on."
This seems to be a rather disturbing new part of our market reality.
Recall the DeCSS case. Several dozen named defendants, and several hundred "Does", were threatened in court by the DVD-CCA, acting as a representative of the interests of some of the largest companies on Earth. Whammo, most of the people capitulated, the courts bowed to the pressure of the RIAA's fat pocketbooks, and the DVD-CCA's will became law-- DeCSS is now effectively "illegal". Cases like this spam one seem to be the result of "trickle-down" thinking-- or as Star Control 2 would have it, "dribble-down"-- whereby smaller and smaller companies begin to adopt the same nasty tactics.
Let's face it-- if you run a small and/or non-profit site, and if some company or businessperson with lots of money (or even a moderate amount of money) makes a credible threat to send in the lawyers, you're at least as likely as not to give in to their pressure. It's simple survival instinct-- no one wants to get sued, especially (A) in this economy and (B) by someone with much fatter coffers than themselves.
What this is leading to is a situation where the rich can effectively (and, as close to possible, directly-- about the only more direct way would be to put a gun to one's head!) force the poor to do whatever they want. No laws (legal, moral or otherwise) really seem to touch the really "big fish" (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc.), and they get away with a slap on the wrist-analogue at worst; now, even smaller entities like these spammers can effectively throw their monetary weight around to silence dot-bomb-impoverished techies running innocent sites.
I fear that this trend will become far more pervasive, and will get far worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better... I personally do not believe that the current Powers That Be in the US really care that much about "the little guys" getting spurious lawsuit threats every time they do something someone Richer-Than-Thou happens to dislike...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
This type of story is too common lately. Spammers get their emails discovered, the address is posted and they whine and bitch because they get spam. How about all of us get together and compare notes on which spams we get, find the responsible party and get busy on 'em. After all we are 'hackers' are we not? I'm sure that within the slashdot crowd lies the potential to really deal a blow against spammers. heh
we should launch the friggin holy war of tech against spam.
we have bayesian filters, RBL lists, white lists.. all sorts of tools that only attack the tip of the problem. We all need to get together and destroy the many bases of spam. The US government has its war against terror. We nerds should launch our war against spammers. We are just as capable to fight this war as the US is to fight theirs.
p r m t h s
That if spammers had what most slashdotters considered a fully-functional mind, the old "giving them a dose of their own medicine" routine would wise them up.
Since spammers seem to have selective ethics at best, all we can really do is enjoy them drowning in their own kind of filth for a while without the warm fuzzy that they're actually learning their lesson.
I firmly believe that people who engage in anti-social behaviour that negatively affects their social group should be subjected to appropriate retribution from the affected group... I'm very disappointed that as I post this, I have yet to see someone suitably sleuthful track down and post the censored information.
Folks, spammers are the messengers. You can shoot them all day and the spam will keep coming.
The target must be those who hire the spammers. After all, spammers are doing this for the money. No money, no spam.
Target the spammers income stream.
Alyxsandra Sachs
112 Catamaran St
Marina Del Rey, CA 90292-5769
(310)578-1728
Sue me. I'm a poor college student with plenty of free time and malicious friends. Make my day.
No statement is true, not even this one.
If somebody punches me (and I didn't deserve it)... I'd do whatever it took to ensure he never hit me again.
What would you do, Mr. Idealist? Stand there and take it while saying, "Please don't do that!"? Perhaps if you one day end up lying on the ground in a pool of your own blood you'll rethink this and consider that MAYBE you should have defended yourself.
That's true -- Mohandas Gandhi favored ten eyes for an eye. When the Nawab of Maler Kotla issued an edict demanding ten Muslims dead for every Hindu killed in the state, Mr. Nonviolent-Resistance gave it his blessing. Oh, and let's not forget the fact that up until World War I, he was just fine being an officer in the British Army (fought in the Boer Wars and the Zulu wars). Or that he let his wife die because he didn't want her to receive a penicillin injection to fight her pneumonia (hey, the guy had his principles). Of course, those principles didn't extend to refusing the quinine that saved his life when he was suffering from malaria.
Not to jump all over you in particular, Joe, it's just that I'm sick and tired of everybody talking about Gandhi like he wasn't a total dick. I mean, Christ, the guy told the Jews that they would be better off killing themselves than resisting the Nazis.
Sources: Richard Grenier's article "The Gandhi Nobody Knows," published in the March 1983 Commentary, and William L. Shirer's Gandhi: A Memoir (1979).
They that would sacrifice their
I wonder if the NYT hates spam as much as the rest of us do, and knows that publishing articles about specific spammers will cause certain unpleasantnesses for those spammers?
Heh, I love how negativistic SlashDot's moderation system was on this one. Almost as bad as pessimistic lil' ol' me.
The post started at 2 (cuz I have nice karma), and got a bunch of mod-ups and ONE mod-down ("Offtopic"). So the Slash code did the math and dutifully reported the score as 5 (correct)... and of course focused solely on the fact that my post was modded "Offtopic". Of all the modding done to my post, it only noted the ONE NEGATIVE MOD in the Score line.
And I thought I saw the world through blue-tinted glasses...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Sure it's funny to imagine that these spammers are themselves getting deluged with spam. But what happens if some nutcase firebombs their house, abducts their children, or murders their wife, as a direct result of seeing of the spammers' "outing" ?
Would it be funny or just then ?
RTFA. Techdirt specifically said the threat had nothing to do with their decision, since it was unlikely to happen and even less likely to succeed. They pulled the information out of respect for privacy.
Personally, I disagree. In general, a business has little or no right to privacy; their address is required by law to be public knowledge. IMHO, a business that intentionally intrudes on people's lives deserves none at all. But more importantly, contact information for Alyxsandra Sachs is public, not private:
Furthermore: from the NYT article: "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?"
Between downloading it from our mail server, sorting it into a local folder, skimming the preview, and pressing delete, my office spends a couple thousand dollars a year in salaried employee time. Does that answer your question, Alyx?
--done this myself on a few occassions. It's learning some normal court room procedure and buzz words that is the most important. Usually the county clerk will help as well, finding the correct forms, etc. You can also research similar cases to see what worked and what didn't. I was actually so well prepared in two cases, cases actually against the government, that they capitulated shy of the actual court. One got to the court house steps before they caved though.
Throwing some cash at a good paralegal in advance helps too, they are usually the ones who prep their lawyers anyway, and are heaps 0 cash cheaper.
Think of court like any other construct. this does this, this does that. This comes first, then that, then that. If you follow their rules, they will let you play. and it really is just a big game, a game combined with some drama.
I haven't done it in a long time though, I imagine it's even easier now with having the internet to help with research.
I am sort of wondering now why there aren't more court cases brought against spammers in the states that have some laws against it. Even if it's hard to collect damages, just getting convictions in anti spammers favor helps establish more precedent.
Another really useful tool is to hold elected and appointed politicians and bureaucrats feet to the fire to uphold the laws via investigating if they're NOT doing their jobs, and are therefore in violations of their respective oaths,job descriptions, etc and see if they have ethics codes violations based along those lines.
It's pretty simple to make their businesses unviable. Just visit the sites they're advertising! Not just once, not twice, but 24/7. Reload the biggest pages all day long everyone! Think a spamvertised company can still turn a profit while paying for 500GB bandwidth per day? I don't think so...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Has anybody tried to prosecute spammers for executing what amounts to a denial of service attack? When 99% of your email is unsolicited commercial bulk email, it makes that 1% very hard to find. Isn't this a small scale DoS attack on an individual? Isn't the cumulative effect on ISPs huge?
When I moved into my new home, I discovered the previous owners were mail-order people. I was receiving 100-120 catalogs every week (literally). My recycling company refused to cart off our weekly junk mail. Bills were getting lost, wedged between the pages of catalogs. I registered with the DMA, and I sent over 350 letters and made more than 100 phone calls to snail-mail spammers. Eventually it made difference. Now (three years later) we get about 10 catalogs a week. I spent a lot of time and money (postage, envelopes, etc.), but at least most of the 200 companies respected our wishes (in time, after multiple notices).
With email spam, we don't even have the option of complaining and opting-out. And yes, email bills are sometimes blocked by my ISP's spam filters. So haven't the spammers effectively eliminated our email service by flooding it? Isn't that a denial of service attack?