Slashdot Mirror
Good Guys 2, Spammers 0
JoeJob writes "A couple of victories in the legal war against spammers. First, a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam. Second, looks like the spammers who are trying to sue Spamhaus, SPEWS, and other spam blacklists have decided to tuck their tails and run. Let's hope this trend continues." If you care to celebrate this, one food springs to mind.
I don't think it's right to sue someone because they're trying to help block spam, but I think the way that some blacklists go about it is very much wrong and harmful to innocent bystanders, and they really should be held more accountable than they are.
i won't be happy until there is no spam at all....
Then I guess you won't be happy.
Look at the articles that show that there are enough gullible people out there to give the spammers a viable (if repugnant) business model.
I figure the bogus lawsuits against spamhaus present a good way for us to fight back. If we can take down some of the main offenders, it won't necessarily reduce the amount of spam we get, but it might act as a bit of a deterrent for some of the other pond scum.
We need to fix the SMTP protocol to put these guys out of business for good. That, or a bullet...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
You run a site that promotes porn, if someone disagrees with porn should they DDos you? The answer is no, they just shouldn't look at your site.
SPEWS is pretty much the same thing, if you don't like them don't use them. If you don't like that your ISP uses them, switch ISP's or have them remove the spam filtering on your account, it's that simple.
It's very apparent you have never had to deal with spam and angry users at the ISP level, it's a whole different ball game, don't advocate DDos of the tools that we need to protect our users. You shouldn't advocate DDos for anything, not even spammers.
Litigation is a fate worse than a thousand deaths. Lawyers have powers to destroy that far exceed anything mere torturers have available. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can be used to forever dissolve your sense of security, seal away prosperity, call down imprisonment, tortures, and exile, and to confuse you, and kill you in installments, wasting your time away with convoluted garbage. Being flayed alive to death doesn't quite match being nickel-and-dimed to death. One torment lasts hours, another lasts decades.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
Don't forget, these spammers are actually making considerable profit doing what they do!
At first, you might feel it's excessive to make someone pay out $250,000 for dumping a bunch of spam mail on somebody (presumably by accident, since they couldn't think it made any kind of business sense to send mail tens of thousands of times to the same address?).
If the punishment isn't high enough to make the spammer think twice about his/her actions though, it won't function as a deterrence. (It's fine and good that settlements make amends for wrong done to the person suing, but in cases like this, it's sensible to ensure the money awarded is sufficient to deter the accused from doing the same thing to somebody else. Why cause more people to tie up the court system with similar cases brought against the same guy, if you can put a stop to it the first time?)
It's not about the money, it's not about the individual spammer, it's about a little thing called precedent
In the end it's about winning in court - and a $250,000 win in court would be would more than twice that in settlement. Spammers, time to duck and cover, because I see only more of this type of legal retaliation in the future.
lets leave bandwith and storage out of it and fixate on time lets say it takes you half a minute to delete each spam. If you make $120 an hour then thats a buck to delete the email. Yes I relize thats roughly a quarter of a million dollar sallery but it's not unreasonable people make that mucha nd more. Actualy I think the damages are supposed to be punitive not compensitory. With punitive damages it's a fine that they person that files suit gets to collect sort of a prize for actualy spening all that time on the suit. Compensiory damages are for actual costs incured.
No sir I dont like it.
or really hate freedom.
nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication. i find it amazing that the slashdot crowd who are usually such virulent defenders of an unfettered internet are more than willing to give the government more control when it comes to penis-pill ads!
if you don't like spam, do something about it. filter, build a honeypot relay, whatever. but don't go whining to the feds demanding they regulate a free and open communications channel.
2 1337 4 u!
or really hate freedom.
Good point. I mean, if I want to spray-paint advertisements on the side of your house, and then charge you for the materials used, that's my right! Free speech and freedom and all that, right?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
but don't go whining to the feds demanding they regulate a free and open communications channel.
Actually, it's not a free communications channel. You, me, and everyone else that connects to the internet has to pay for that connection.
Unlike television and radio, where advertisements are a necessary requirement in order to enjoy free reception (if you have cable, it's your own fault! TV and radio are broadcast free to you) of the programs, spam actually unnecessarily consumes bandwidth and time, especially for those on dial-up and/or metered accounts, and enriches no body but the spammer.
Spam is like all that junk mail you get in your snail mail box every day, except the spammer doesn't even have to pay bulk postage rates.
Whereas TV and radio ads are a kind of symbiosis, where you agree to watch the ads (whether you really do or not), and you get the programming for free, spam is like a parasite. It rides along on the internet, not paying for the bandwidth it steals from people, and clogging their in-box with worthless junk.
No matter where you go... there you are.
We only support freedom if it doesn't bother us.
We only support freedom/rights as long as they don't overlap our own freedom/rights.
In other words,
Your right to walk down the street swinging your arms around like a windmill ends where the tip of my nose begins.
Your right to listen to your choice of music at your choice of volumes ends at the point where I can hear it.
Your right to speak (including sending spam) ends at the point where I decide I don't want to hear it any more.
In my opinion spam is worse than telemarketing phone calls and if there can be federal regulations that keep somewhat legit telemarketers from interrupting my dinner, there is no reason there can't be similar legislation that stops spam from filling my inbox.
It's Wednesday afternoon and my 'Probable Junk Mail' folder already has 228 messages in it since quitting time last Friday. Someone sold part of our corporate e-mail list to a spammer and I'm one of the lucky few to be in that group. I can't even begin to imagine how much spinning drive space is currently occupied by spam messages in my employer's computer systems (dozens of GB I'm sure) let alone the entire world...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
It took the folks behind SPEWS to get ISP's around the world to sit up and take stock of their problems with hosting spammers, spammish websites and providing dns to spammers. Nothing hits home like listening to a customer tell you about how you're going to leave their service unless they clean up their network space.
or really hate freedom.
Or really hate theft.
nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication.
No, it's about the government preventing someone else's "communication" from costing us money. If you want to rent a blimp to advertise your penis-pills, go for it. If you want to pay to put an ad in the back of Rolling Stone, more power to you. If you want to buy time during the Superbowl, have at it. But don't waste my bandwidth and storage, costing me money, by sending your spam to me.
if you don't like spam, do something about it. filter, build a honeypot relay, whatever.
I do. I own the domain anti-spam.org. I use multiple filters and blacklists. I have a honeypot system that includes the time, date, and IP of the system that harvested the address off of my web page. I am a member of CAUCE. I do plenty about it already.
but don't go whining to the feds demanding they regulate a free and open communications channel.
I resent your use of the term "whining." It is rude and inaccurate. The whole problem with e-mail is that it is not "free" in the monetary sense. ISPs and corporations spend incalculable sums of money on bandwidth, servers, storage, backup, administration, filtering products, to deal with spam.
According to Brightmail, roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States was spam as of March of this year. That means that four of every ten mail servers at major ISPs are needed just because of spam. It means that 40% of the bandwidth that the ISPs buy for e-mail is used by spam. It means that ISP's customers are paying for the spam.
If I come over to your house and spraypaint an ad for my autobody shop on your car's hood, don't complain. It's just me exercising my rights to free speech.