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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.
Back in the day; when the debate about allowing comerical interest on the Internet fired up, many predicted that today' situation would be the outcome... *soft crap destroying the backbone and .com(ers) diluting the content to the lowest common denominator.
i won't be happy until there is no spam at all.... That, or capital punishment. Nothing like deterring spam with a good caneing. Anyone who recieves a copy of the spam gets to give the offender a whack. In extreme cases (porn sent to childrens email address, etc.) the spammer is sent to a federal -pound me in the ass- prison. Don't even ask about what happens for the penis enlargement senders ;)
Too bad it'd never be feasible to penalize all of the people who aren't patching their systems and thus flooding people's inboxes with virus spam. I'm still getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of fscking "Your Details" e-mails every day -- despite the fact that the problem was widely publicized and (supposedly) widely patched. In a way, this is worse than spam, because not only do I often get more virus mails than regular spams, I *know* I'm using a lot more bandwidth on all the SoBig.F crap...but until it's ever feasible to punish folks who won't/can't patch their systems, I guess we're stuck with this crap, too.
How To Get Humans To Mars
When a group of lawyers thinks you are too sleazy to join them, then that's really saying something!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
58,000 separate offers to make $10,000 each = a lot more $$$$ than the $250,000 he got He obviously picked the wrong option in suing
Spam and rice is what my Hawaiian college buddies called it. You could smell it all the way down the drom hall. And it tastes really good. Really. ;) Kind of reminds me of sushi, only saltier.
...good guys: 2, Spammers 1,943,238,345,753,261 (today alone)
Screw that. If the RIAA can charge people $150,000 per song, scumbag spammers should have to pay us $250,000 per e-mail!
you can sign up at their How Can I Help page, and apparently it costs nothing to join.
If you're not in the U.S., you can sign up to their international chapters:
EuroCAUCE - Serving the entire continent
CAUBE.AU - Serving Australia, New Zealand, and all of the Pacific Rim
CAUCE Canada
CAUCE India - Serving Asia and the Indian subcontinent
I'll be signing up today.
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.
You can imagine my dissapointment.
You'd have people signing up for AOL, just to get the spam.
Now 2.5mil woul be painful, but 250k doesn't seem like much. But at least another one bites the dust. And hopefully this will encourage others who have the means to continue to sue spammers. I have the will, but no means. As in I have a desire and a bunch of email records yet I have no money for a lawyer and googling for free info seems to bring up useless adds for stuff I don't need.
On another note I was eating dinner wiht a friend and she told me in VERY strong terms that spam would "never go away" and as a business practice it works great and she supports it. She said in her company's case they "send" out their marketing material to harvested emails that are sold to them froma third party. Yet inthe next sentence she complains about getting penis enlargemtn emails and breast enhancers.....
meh!
Ave Molech Setting
According to the article, Washington State law would have allowed the guy who filed the suit to receive 29 million dollars. He only asked for a quarter million. (Presumably because it was "enough.")
The best anti-spam tool I've found so far is SpamBayes, a great open source app that lets you decide what is spam and what isn't. Just train it for a few days (perhaps longer depending how much Spam you get in a day) and it'll filter all the junk mail to a separate folder. If there are any false positives (or negatives), just move it to a "good" folder and train it again. After a week of training, it hasn't failed once!
This is all well and good, but it will be news for real when the spam house pays up. The chances of ever collecting on this judgment are slim and none.
Actually finding and garneshing their accounts is possible but I can not imagine that will be easy or practical.
The other question I have is, how about a class action law suit. I know about 100 million people that would like to sue, the ULTIMATE class action.
Tech solutions will beat legal ones in this fight. Check out Mailinator
I, fo' on', welcom da' new musubi cookin' overlords
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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
But I'd still like to see SPEWS sued into the stone age. If you want to block spam, that's fine... but you just can't convince me that blocking thousands of legit servers, just because they're close to spam servers, is in any way a good practice.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Bah to that.
I used the Osirusoft lists for a good while. They helped me reject more spam than you can shake a stick at. I don't care about the guy's personality that runs the show (Joe), I just like his product. Just as I like OpenBSD.
Trolling is a art,
Why, the damages are punitive my good sir. YANNL (Youse Ain't Not No Lawyer)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
According to the article, there is an FTC commissioner named Orson Swindle.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Thats the funny thing: they *DIDN'T* find the lawyer.
Mark Felstein is not only the representing council for EMarketersAmerica, he's also their sole corporate officer, and as far as anyone can tell, their only member. The EMA was formed mere weeks before the lawsuit was filed.
One of the defendants assertions has always been that EMarketersAmerica was formed for the sole purpose of filing the lawsuit. In fact, somewhere on the NANAE threads was a remark that Felstein admitted that he would dissolve EMarketersAmerica at his earliest opportunity once the lawsuit was resolved.
Of course, the defendants might have a thing or two to say about that...
Don't even ask about what happens for the penis enlargement senders
They are sent to Federal PMINTA Prisons, and their cellmates are given viagara and enlargment pills that work?
It's called "punative damages". I surely don't cost $10,000 just to pick up the phone (although, there's a goal to strive for...) but the new federal "Do Not Call" list has just that as the penalty for bypassing it.
Fines are usually *not* based on the "cost" but instead of "deterent value". If the fine was a penny, the spammer might just pay it.
Sig under construction since 1998.
a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam
Somehow, I fell like I'd really like to receive a lot of SPAM now.
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.
Okay, It seems to me that there is a simple solution to all of these spam related problems.
Instead of relying on a technological solution that will be circumvented sooner or later, why not follow the money?
Going after the spammers themselves seems to be a losing proposition because they have become adept at being elusive. The people in this equation that cannot afford to be elusive are the ones that are actually collecting money from the targets of spam. The people that are paying the spammers for their services are the ones that need to be penalized. When the spammers are no longer useful they will die out.
Making money from spam should be made illegal. I think it would be a lot more effective at reducing spam than the methods that are being used now.
If my logic is in any way flawed, please let me know.
We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose. We understand that hearing us say this is important to you...
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.
it seems to me more like this puts the score at "good guys: 2, spammers: 93856299376591".
maybe I'm just pessimistic?
A new multilevel marketing business...
Here's how:
1) Move to Washington state.
2) Set up an email account.
3) Populate the web with your email address.
4) Collect the spam.
5) Sue for thousands.
Under your "logic" (note the quotes), you would encourage a city to put up military roadblocks, and prevent anyone from going in, when they find one crack dealer in your neighborhood.
Please. SPEWS is intended for blocking email, not EVERYTHING.
I have the freedom to associate with whomever I want. So do you. Do not our servers have the right to associate with whichever servers we choose? Apparently not, in your opinion.
And when you go to complain, noone exists. Not "you know their name, but don't have access to them", but "nobody knows their names, and we won't tell you".
There's a reason for that, too. Simply running a blocklist, no matter how gentle, will get you harassment from spammers, death threats, frivolous lawsuits, etc. Those who formed SPEWS simply wanted to avoid all that. (I am not SPEWS, nor do I know who is.)
Filthstein is trying to voluntarily drop the case against the individuals listed on his frivolous suit in an attempt to avoid paying for the legal fees in behalf of the defendants.
If he gets his wish, he's won. The only purpose of that lawsuit was to cause as much cost as possible to the defendants in legal fees and otherwise. It was such a blatant attempt to stiffle free speech, that Filthstein should be disbarred for it.
The lawsuit also exposed him as the quack as he is. He should be disbarred for that reason as well. You guys should read the motion to dismiss from the defendants' lawyers. It's absolutely hilarious on how it points out the glaring errors in Filthstein's suit. It's not just factual errors regarding the issue at hand, but procedural errors any competent lawyer would've caught before he would've filed the suit.
For the "FUCK SPEWS" crowd out there, this suit had NOTHING to do with SPEWS. Filthstein and his buddy, convicted cocaine trafficker Eddy Marin, were suing the most vocal critics of Eddy's spam empire, that's all. They just wrapped it around the "we hate SPEWS" banner, because otherwise it would've been too obvious that the suit was nothing but a SLAPP suit.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
> If my network neighbor spams you, how the fuck is it my fault?
It isnt. And no one said it was. (Or if they did, they are wrong.)
> How is my ISP being a dork about it my fault?
Again, it isnt. Nor is anyone claiming it is.
You are not being blocked.
Your ISP is being blocked, and rightfully so.
9 times out of 10, the ISP (be it local or backbone) is willingly and knowingly faking records to show that the spam came from your ISPs space, or another of their customers IP blocks. That is why ISPs like UUnet do not allocate IP space correctly (SWIP it with arin.) Its because if they SWIPed some space but not others, then we could easily block UUnets spammers by rejecting mail from non SWIPed IPs.
But UUnet will purposly not SWIP your ISPs block, or your block, to you. This way they can hide spamemrs in their IP space and no one but UUnet can tell who is doing it.
When a backbone or ISP does this, they become listed by SPEWs.
Fuck you and any ISP that willingly hides spammers amongs innocent customers.
And as a final note, you dont need to contact SPEWs admins EVER.
Why would you? What do you plan to say?
YOU are not listed, thus YOU can not be removed.
Your ISP, or their ISP is listed. Only they can be removed.
Atleast as of now, it is still totally legal to boycott any company you choose to, and they are not suppost to be able to pass a law to FORCE you into buying a companys products you dont want.
SPEWs is a boycott of email.
You bitching about how your spam loving backbone is having an adverse effect on you is just like the RIAA bitching about people not buying their CDs so they pass laws to get their money anyway.
If your ISP hosted 95% kiddie porn, would you be as quick to bitch that the world blocks them (and thus you), and still insist that they are 'ok guys' and you shouldnt be blocked?
LOL! That made me almost spew coffee all over my laptop, and I'm not even drinking coffee.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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!
Make the RIAA copyright "pen1s enlargement", "v14gr4" and stuff.
Now, what will happen if they send (not share) thousands of copies of it
Im all too happy with that
how long until
Don't worry. I just signed you up for a whole lot more
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!!!
See U.S. Supreme Court
ROWAN v. U. S. POST OFFICE DEPT., 397 U.S. 728
Chief Justice BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court:
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit.... The ancient concept that 'a man's home is his castle' into which 'not even the king may enter' has lost none of its vitality.... We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. That we are often 'captives' outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives everywhere.... The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."
You can read the entire Supreme Court decision on the FindLaw web page (http://www.findlaw.com/). The specific URL is http://www.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=U
Then of course, there's the CyberPromo/AOL lawsuit, in which the judge held that CP had no First Amendment right to send UCE to AOL's customers. The transcript for that case can be found at:
http://www.leepfrog.com/E-Law/Cases/Cyber_Promo_v
Note: Most of this was lifted verbatim from Message-ID: 343A9BBF.4340@stanford.edu
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
is to make my email as public as possible and hope to win a settlement...$250k should cover my $40k/year education plus a little grad school quite nicely....
goaheadandtryme@elinxubox.com
go ahead try...I'll see you in court
Brian
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.
Your right to speak (including sending spam) ends at the point where I decide I don't want to hear it any more.
I then, to prove a point, revoke your right to speak as I don't want to hear it anymore.
Thank you, and have a nice lifetime of quiet solitude. I appreciate it.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
But... but...
Damn...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
You're misinterpreting his point. There is a difference between public and private free speech. Slashdot is a public forum, so we can say what we like. But we can't break inside your house and make you be a captive audience.
Go right ahead. Add him to the "Foes" page of your SlashDot account and configure it to mod all his articles down to -1. Voila, you don't have to hear it anymore.
This forum is a perfect agument against you - anybody can speak, and you can choose to block anybody you don't want to listen to.
I'm well aware of that supposed procedure ("supposed" because, after all, who can verify it?). It still comes down to the fact that I can't send email to anyone with a SPEWS-crippled mailserver - not because of my sins, or my ISP's sins, or even their upstream's regional office's sins, but because of the old actions of someone in another part of my continent.
I know that the idea is to increase collateral damage to the point that the pressure on the offending ISP. How would you recommend that I do that? I'm one of thousands of customers at my ISP. They are one of thousands of ISPs that use that upstream. What would you say is a more effective target of my efforts:
I'll leave you to guess which path I took.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
How appropriate, that an article about spam would be submitted by a user named JoeJob.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Ya know, everyone admits that SpamAssassin kicks ass.. I personally have it catching about 95% of my spam, which is a level I'm very happy with. 1-2 spams a day isn't a lot to have to delete.
The problem (at least with me and a lot of my friends), was that I have 5 addresses (I'm a webmaster for 2 different sites). The one site I really had control over had SpamAssassin, but the other ones were admin'd by someone else (who was too lazy to install SpamAssassin).
I recently found a free service out there that not only uses spam assassin, but allows you to use it when viewing *ANY* of your email addresses. So now I've even got my @hotmail address being scanned with SpamAssassin.
I don't mean for this to sound like a retarded plug, but I'm VERY happy with this service (well, as long as it stays free!). It even allows you to store files online and generate temporary accounts.. you should seriously check it out: www.shadango.com
Nate Dogg
When all else fails, fall back to mindless venom.
I assert that spam is very much like spray-painting advertisements onto unwilling people's property and making them pay for the materials. In fact, I assert that spamming is actually doing exactly that. You seem to be trying to refute it through ridicule rather than intelligence.
Not that I'm surprised. Your "Internet destroyer" comment means that you're either a spammer, or someone who is just as stupid as a spammer.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
There are limitation as to what somebody can send you in the mail. Also mail fraud is a federal offence and there are strict laws dictating what can be mailed and how. What do you think would happen so somebody who mailed unsolicited pornography?
Also 99% of all spam is fraudulant in nature. Those pills will not make your dick bigger and there is no money secreted away in nigeria.
If the govt put the same restrictions on spam that they do n mail and telemarketing I would be very happy.
War is necrophilia.
The problem is not with spam, nor with laws. The problem is with the SMTP protocol. There is currently no way to track the originator's IP, nor any way set 'content type' flags. If the originator's IP were known to be accurate and preserved, it would be easy(ier) for routers to implement "The first 200 emails in x seconds are fast, then kick down to one email per minute" or "When (threshold) emails from a source is reached, insert 'Bulk Mail' flag if it doen't exist". Mail readers could then be set to accept email from 'my favourite mailing list' but ignore all other 'Bulk Mail'. At this point, spamming becomes non profitable, as most people have it auto-deleted.
This still allows people to send well targetted, unsolicited email in low volumes (Most of my clients appreciated getting an unsolicited email offering my services, because I did the research to find out they were looking for someone like me, but were unaware of me). The typical "spam" will disapear, because the volumes will not be received to make it cost justifiable.
Any laws passed on the current technology will fail because not ALL countries will pass identical laws. A slight tweek to the protocol will allow filter/routers (yes higher layer than just IP routers) and readers to, over time, eliminate the problem.
This topic is timely in my case. Today I got a message from AOL that my domain, tgrigsby.com, was banned from sending emails to anyone inside AOL. Apparently, www.comusnetorg.us was using my domain in the "Sender" of the spams they were sending. They would generate random user names and prepend them to the that domain. The domain in the emails was fiveaalive.biz, which was a junk domain registered by comusnetorg.us and which redirected to the comusnetorg.us website.
All to sell fools illegal, fake, or nonexistent prescription drugs.
I've contacted my ISP in the hopes that they can smooth the ruffled feathers at AOL. And now I'm pondering the wisdom of suing a company that, according to the whois record, is based in the UK.
I feel they owe me money for using my domain name. I've now been personally affected by their actions, and I'm PISSED. I'd like to sue for possession of every testicle in the company, delivered to me floating in a jar of pickle juice, but that seems a bit unrealistic, so I guess I'll have to go for money.
Are there any lawyers here that can comment on my chances?
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***