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Microsoft Files 15 Lawsuits Against Spammers
Popsikle writes "A Seattle Paper reports that 'Microsoft Corp. announced it has filed 15 lawsuits against alleged e-mail spammers in Washington state and the United Kingdom on Tuesday.' It states the tough anti-spam laws in UK and Washington allows ISP's to sue spammers. This could be a good test of the new anti-spam laws." There's coverage on CNN as well. Microsoft has picked a good venue for such a case.
A full list can be found on microsoft's site:
u n0 3/0617SpamEnforcementFS.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/J
</karmawhore>
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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Typical Reg style. Not very interesting though.
I've successfully sued as an "interactive service provider" under this law. The justification seems to be that the spammer is engaging in unfair/deceptive business practices at the expense of the "interactive service provider", so that provider should be allowed to seek compensation for that.
Have fun,
Nathan 'Nato' Uno
http://web.unos.net/
You know, you don't really save bandwidth this way.
You just shift the data over to other servers, who may or may not be able to handle the load better.
So this ends up in the next global legislation mess: we all agree that we need global legislation, but the big fight is whether is will be US, European or one of the SE Asian.
And this mess will only be solved when all governments have the same interests.
You must have a easily guessable hotmail address.
My hotmail username has a number & a special character in it. It has never recieved any spam in the 5 years that I have been using it.
The only solution is to make it unprofitable. I suggest planting whatever program Sen. Hatch plans on using for destroying computers into all the adware on the internet, I'm guessing the people who download that are the same people who actually buy stuff from spam.
Ahh.... No. I help lots of my friends unfsck their computers from things like adware and viruses, and I have noticed that the majority of people who end up with adware on their computers (all intelligent college students) end up with it for two reasons 1) they use MSIE and 2) they fail to understand that IE's design makes it so that the simple act of visiting a website will make you subject to viruses, drive-by downloads, adware, and many other goodies that take advantage of IE's "extensible interface."
This usually results in me educating them on 1) the dangers of clicking "yes" on any dialog box without actually reading it, 2) enabling ActiveX and JScript by default, and 3) the virtues of using a well designed browser. I then remove the adware, install Mozilla, show them how to turn off software downloads and popup windows and they are quite happy.
I can honestly say that not one single person I have helped out such a predicament would actually buy anything from spam. As a matter of fact, they are usually pretty good at spotting spam, they just don't know how to get rid of it (i.e., filter it before it gets to them).
- Register of Known Spam Operations
That and the news.admin.net-abuse.email and news.admin.net-abuse.sightings groups contains plenty of good information on who these scumbags are and how they operate.Just this morning I got 5 emails from hotmail accounts asking if I wanted:
:-)
Spammers fake the sender's address all the time. If you dug into the mail header details I'm willing to bet they didn't come from Hotmail servers.
Try typing this in exactly as shown:
telnet your.smtp.server 25
HELO somedomain.com
MAIL FROM:
RCPT TO:
DATA
Subject: junk subject line
junk body text
.
The blank line after the subject and the dot on the line by itself are important.
Congratulations - you've just sent yourself a forged e-mail. Easy wasn't it?
It'd be great to stop spam, but doing so requires major changes to the email infrastructure on too many computers worldwide. I'm not saying it can't or won't happen, but it's not going to happen soon enough. Spammers will destroy email first.
The best solution available to us today are filters. And with Bayesian it works really damn well. No, it doesn't avoid the bandwidth and disk space involved in transferring the spam, but it does address the single largest cost of spam: the time of the end user. When compared to disk space and bandwidth, the user's time is the single largest cost of spam. If filters can reduce the amount of time users spend dealing with spam then we've solved the major cost component of dealing with spam.
Of course, if fewer users see spam then spam becomes less and less effective and there is less motivation for spammers to send it.
The solution is technical, not legislative--although I do support suing spammers for theft of services, fraud, etc.
Under the Washington law (Revised Code of Washington 19.190) both the end-user recipient and the "interactive computer service" that that recipient uses may sue the spammer. The "interactive computer service" is not suing on the user's behalf, but on their own behalf.
And I think this is great, personally. If all major ISPs did this, SPAM load would go down significantly. Of course it wouldn't disappear completely, and the really tricky spammers would be trickier, but the overall load would certainly go down and the remaining SPAM would very likely be easier to block...
Have fun,
Nathan 'Nato' Uno
http://web.unos.net/
Well, except that they haven't been enacted yet, and there's this little thing called Ex Post Facto. Also, the most effective anti-spam bills are unfortunately not the most likely to pass Congress:
- Schumer's bill endorsed by CAUCE
- Schumer seeks international anti-spam treaty
But Tauzin's pro-spam bill will probably get the votes.Before that it was chinanet.com.net (or some other stupid variation). They stopped about two weeks after Sprint started asking for copies of the spams. Thank you Sprint.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
The BBC's The Money Programme are doing an edition on junk (postal) mail and spam tonight at 19:30 BST. The Money Programme tends to be fairly influential and usually has high journalistic and production values.
If you're in the UK, or have access to BBC2 tonight, watch it!
Ah yes, yet another clueless jackass who doesn't know exactly how the First Amendment works.
To enlighten you would take far more time then I have. In fact, I suspect that the sun would go cold long before knowledge pentrated the thickness of your skull.
So, simply put:
The First Amendment, aka Freedom of Speech, only applies to the government attempting to abridge speech. If a ISP says "You can't send spam on our servers", then tough shit, cousin, it's not a First Amendment violation.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.