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Disgruntled Fan Arrested, Indicted For Spam Attacks
An anonymous reader submits: "A *very* interesting precedent here might get set here. A California man has been arrested by the FBI for sending spam spoofing the From: email address of several Philadelphia-area newspaper editors and writers. The charges relate to the damage caused by having the bounces sent back to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, with a total of more than 160,000 bounced emails. Maximum penalties: 471 years in federal prison, $117 million in fines." And not just arrested, either -- Reader red_dragon points to the indictment (PDF linked from this U.S. Attorney's Office release).
Sending spam is bad.
That being said, does it seem a little unfair that the indictment charges him with "hacking", when in fact he just spoofed his email address?
"Oh, beautiful for spacious skies...."
gah.
have you been seen on slash?
471 years in prison for spamming? 100s of millions in fines?
I dont care how much you nerds hate spam. Prison is for people dangerous to society. Murderers, rapists, other assorted thugs. Society isn't helped because a spammer is in jail.
Why this the first case they pick up on, because this guy dared to screw with the media? (Think Lamo and the NYT thing). Government/media go hand in hand these days.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
A *very* interesting precendent here might get set here.
This might *not* have been read by a slashdot editor might *not* have read this.
If I were king of the universe, rather, WHEN I am king of the universe, spammers will get the death penalty.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Thus the old maxim:
Never tick off people who buy paper by the roll and ink by the barral.
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
For forged bounced emails, the fine is 1 day in prison and/or $734. Per email.
:)
I got 500 bounced emails from a university in Canada once, should I sue them using this as a precedent?
I could *really* use $365,000. I'd even accept it in Canadian dollars (in fact, that would be easier, given that I am Canadian).
I can see that this will become the new (old) DDoS. What precedent does this set for the "Do-not-Call" SPAM'ers??
This, and more Deep Thoughts after Lunch...
It's a scare tactic. They'll rub the accused's nose in his 471 years, which will convince him to take a plea bargain on only a few counts. He'll most likely serve only a few years and face minimal fines.
471 years in jail, eh? What's so wrong with lifetime?
And isn't prison about rehabilitation? Will this guy rehabilitate by never in his life having a chance of getting out.
Or is prison just about hot male on male action nowadays? I'd say so...
I hope Arnold will create some kind of prison reform.
Oh, and there's a word I didn't know in the article(and I won't even bother checking some book). What does 'scatological' mean?
$117mil/160k mails = $731.25 per email.
Now, I've had spammers use my address as a from: address a couple of times, resulting in a couple of thousand bounces in my inbox.
When should I expect my check for $1,462,500 to arrive?
he's facing 471 years b/c there are:
26 counts of violating section 1030 a5ai
26 counts of violating section 1030 a5aii
27 counts of violating section 1028 a7
that's a total of 79 charges. that works out to about 5.96 years/charge. my question: is this in part function a function of ashcroft's "maximum penalty" guidelines?
ed
This is crazy - bounced emails don't cause $117 million damage.
The guy could have raped, pillaged and murdered and still do less jail time / fines.
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Why are they prosecuting this guy and not the serious spammers who do this every day?
Is it simply because someone complained to the right people at the FBI to get some action? If so, how do I get the same support if someone does that with my email address? If not, then shouldn't he be able to get off by claiming that he's being singled out instead of receiving equal justice?
When people like Steve Hardigree have done orders of magnitude more damage, are just as easy to find, and have all the evidence ever needed for such an indictment stored at spamhaus.org? It doesn't make sense. Even if you can't get a conviction, which seems unlikely, wouldn't it put a serious dent in the spam problem if some of these worthless spammers were handed an indictment of this size?
Do you have ESP?
You know if the guy just went on a killing spree, he probably would have gotten less jail time. Makes you think how valuable your life is in the eyes of government.
Given the disparity of penalties between, say, a mugging and this spam attack, it's clear that the government would prefer that we express our rage with assault and battery. Most murderers get off with less than 471 years. Lemme know your favorite assault weapon so I can start settling my scores the gov't approved way. note to humor impaired: that's sarcasm there. I agree with General Clark: if you want assault weapons, join the Army -- they've got lot's of 'em.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
If that, in and of itself, can constitute a crime then pretty much every spammer ever is guilty of the same thing -- just spread about amongst different people. Instead of one company incuring all the "financial damage" of bounced emails, it's many thousands with the "damage" spread around.
Still . . . I have to believe that there is something more to this story than is posted here. If the hacking charge truly comes from simply lying in the "From:" portion of an email, then I will have lost all faith in humanity.
And of couse, the punishment is obviously completely absurd. I'm torn about what to do with this guy myself. Clearly what he did constitutes a DOS attack of sorts, and yet what he did is essentially no different than what every spammer does everyday. IANAL, but if this case is sucessfully prosucuted, wouldn't that give precedent for prosecuting every spammer out there?
It is nice to see that in addition to sending spam, he was indited for identity theft and hijacking (or spoofing) the return address.
This is a good precedent for anyone who has dealt with a Joe Job before. (myself included... three thousands bounced messages in two weeks... and counting). That said i think the time, and fine are excessive and don't fit the crime. a week of time total and $50/bounce would be fine by me.
The penalties aren't for the spam he sent, but rather for spoofing the sender's address. Many (hundreds of thousands) of the spam emails he sent out were to bad/non-existent addresses, and were bounced back to the real addresses he faked as his own. The people who received the "returned" emails are suing him, not those that got spammed.
That being said, I agree that the maximum penalties are harsh, to say the least. Then again, they are maximum penalities, and I'd be surprised if he goes to jail for more than 5-10 years, if at all. There's no doubt that he caused damages, but not 117 million dollars worth.
Realistically, there will not be bouncecount charges on the complaint, and all the bounces will be consolidated in some way. A sensible prosecutor would try the first, say, thousand messages, and leave it at that.
This is not my sandwich.
Maybe he should kill off the FBI that have evidence / charging him. Least he'd get a lower maximum sentence.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
"Carlson faces a maximum sentence of 471 years imprisonment and $117,250,000 in fines."
Well damn, I'm heading out to the gun store, gonna rob me some banks, shoot me up some people up and still get out of prison faster than this guy.
Is it just me or has the US Guhvumment been totally hijacked by corporate interests to the point where the US Constitution is just a minor inconvenience?
What happened to no cruel nor unusual punishment, the punishment fitting the crime, our inaliable rights?
The only time I have heard of such a possible maximum has been in the case of multiple-murder and serial child molestation. And even if they give him say... 5 years, he will be financially ruined forever at even a fraction of the proposed monetary damages. So his life might as well be over.. quite lliterally made a slave to the corporations he will have to pay this "restitution" to...
And wasn't slavery constitutionally abolished over 100 years ago? Well as long as he isn't black I guess it's all ok.
Why did the article authors mention the guy being a possible white supremacist? They say that in the first paragraph, as if it were something important, and then don't bother going on to connect that to the events described in the article.
I mean, generally speaking, most people agree that any form of racist supremacy is bad, but if it doesn't have anything to do with the charges against him, then mentioning it just incites the audience unfairly. If his political views do have something to do with his actions, then they should have let us know instead of leaving us hanging.
How did he get caught if he was using comprimised machines to send the spam? Also, that sentence is great. It's a great country that lets murderers and rapists out of jail to make room for non-violent drug offenders and spammers.
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
I could have expected this from a Flyers fan, but a Phillies fan?
What's this world coming to?
Someone you trust is one of us.
Let's look at California penal code.
How about throwing acid in someone's face?
OK, let's see, what if I attack someone with a knife?
Hell, given that Arnie is now governator of California what happens if I start spraying machinegun fire around?
So, four years in jail for permanently disfiguring someone, four years for cutting somebody up with a knife, twelve for machinegunning people and... 471 years for spoofing a From: email header.
Ah, yes, justice...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
It is likely that the sentences will run concurrently rather than sequentially.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Prison is for people dangerous to society. Murderers, rapists, other assorted thugs. Society isn't helped because a spammer is in jail.
Well, it's not helped by leaving them out of jail. They are a public nuisance to millions of people. And in this case, cost someone money. Now, having them taken out and shot, or having their kneecaps broken, would probably be better way to deal with spammers than throwing them in jail, but we have this "cruel and unusual" clause here in the US, so jail it is.
And yes, the Media has some protected status here in the US; pragmatically, because the government desires to keep anything powerful from getting too pissed at it, but also on the principle that people interfering with First-Amendment protected organizations are Bad.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Maximum penalties: 471 years in federal prison, $117 million in fines OR, They could flog the guy on cable TV. I'd pay to see that!!!
I highly recommend following the DOJ links to the indictment. This guy hacked into other computers to send out tens of thousands of bogus emails that caused massive boucebacks to the victims. Sure, the "maximum" sentences look absurd, but that's where the interesting part of this case will come in. The guy clearly needs to have the book thrown at him, and spend some time in "federal, pound-me-in-the-ass prison." Just how much remains to be seen...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
The part about hacking into people's computers should arguably be a prosecutable offense. But "spoofing" the from address should not be: the "From:" line is currently pretty much only advisory and will remain so until there are significant technical changes to the email infrastructure.
And it's too easy to put in the wrong "From:" line accidentally when configuring mail systems. For example, I was using the right account name with the wrong domain name for a week once in my From: line (I thought my mail was broken). Someone else actually got some of the responses intended for me.
I finished my graduate work at U Penn last year, and I recall for a while getting angry Phillies rants virtually everyday from Phil Hagen of the Daily News or an assortment of Philadelphia Inquirer writers. Of course I never though they were from any of these writers. Interestingly, his venom was reserved for the franchise, nary a racist word in them. On the other hand such an angry Phillies fan I've never seen. The messages stopped sometime early last year, maybe as the Phillies blossomed. But I can only presume his anger grew over the summer. Racism and unchecked anger at your home team equals no playoffs.
Ok, You can take off your helmet. The sky is not falling. That is the maximum sentence. Did you *really* believe that it would be imposed? Oh, you did! Sorry.
--
"Now are you talking about what it is you know
Or just repeating what it was you heard."
Grace Slick
Prison is for people dangerous to society. Murderers, rapists, other assorted thugs. Society isn't helped because a spammer is in jail
Research shows that many inmates tend to become even more hardened criminals once they are sent to prison.
When he gets out in 2471, society better watch out.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Why did they go after this attack instead of the DOS on the spam blacklists?
Oh yeah, I forgot, because this was against a newspaper, and not some small fries blacklist operators.
Money talks, huh?
This is obscene. Manson didn't get this harsh a penalty. We all hate spam, but come on! At least limit the jail term to one lifetime.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This guy has been polluting Philadelphia Phillies message boards on mlb.com, espn.com and others. The admin of the board I follow (philliesphans.com) assisted the FBI in nailing this guy.
Click for the thread
In short, this guy is a major prick. I do think the charges are excessive though.
This is a civil matter. The newspapers should sue the guy, he did something wrong, but there is no point in putting the guy in jail for the rest of his life and make him bankrupt. After all, putting someone in prison will acomplish nothing, they are meant to correct people or keep dangerous ones out of society. This will just spend more of tax payers money needlessly. Putting someone in prison for the rest of his life is expensive, and after all don't we have better things to pay for like an illegal war based on lies?
-Seriv
It isn't *just* that he sent thousands of spams. He allegedly hacked into others' PCs and sent the spams from them. Doing so with a bogus return address would have been bad enough, but he allegedly forged return addresses to redirect bounces to Philadelphia sportswriters. Unlike most spammers, this guy had an axe to grind, which made him far more traceable. Also, unlike most spammers, he attacked a very targeted group of people.
The clown involved in this mess is well known on the rec.sport.baseball newsgroup (and presumably in the Phillies newsgroup, as well). Nobody there is shedding a tear over his apprehension. He's a crank and a racist and nobody will miss his lunatic rants.
That said, if he were just a crank and a racist and hadn't done anything specifically illegal, this would be a good time to complain about the preferential treatment received by some in our society. But this particular case is about a guy who broke the law and did so in a way that pointed the finger right back at him. I have a hard time feeling outraged on his behalf.
Death is far too lenient for a spammer, nowhere near enough pain and suffering (except for their family, whom we're not targeting).
I would sentence a spammer to have one kneecap blown off. Apparently that hurts.
Then, if they continue to spam, they should have their remaining kneecap blown off.
If they spam after that, I don't mind.
How nice of the US Attorney's Office to publish the defendant's FULL NAME, CURRENT ADDRESS and DATE OF BIRTH prominently on the web, for all to see.(See linked PDF in topic) Even better, this guy is going to be out of the house for a while, so it should be no problem to pick up his mail.
I swear, the only thing protecting this guy's ID now is his new-found criminal record.
News Flash: China, in a desperate attempt to keep up with the United States has introduced a wave of new registration including the death penalty for spamming. A seperate bill, also introduced, proposes 30 years hard labor for trolling Slashdot.
Now, having them taken out and shot, or having their kneecaps broken, would probably be better way to deal with spammers than throwing them in jail, but we have this "cruel and unusual" clause here in the US, so jail it is.
Why don't we just repeal that, too? Why the hell not? The so-called Bill of Rights looks more like swiss cheese than any protective layer over our rights.
Like what I said? You might like my music
I hate to tell you this but it's not illegal to call someone a "nigger" or anything else.
It's called speech, as in free, not as in beer.
If it were illegal to call someone a "nigger" 99.9% of all blacks would be in prison, seems that's their favorite thing to call EACH OTHER..
Would it have been spam and subject to these penalties if he used his own email address(s)?
Here is the definition I found for spam... An electronic message is "spam" IF: (1) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent; AND (3) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.
If his message was to a particular person and that person welcomes responses on his/her web pages and does not offer anything other than an opinion, it would not be spam until the guy complains.
If the perpetrator had a script that sent one email a day until the writer or person responded then asked a friend if he would do the same it would be annoying but not illegal.
Lesson of the day: Spam is bad... do you homework first.
The article begins with the line: "A California man who's an apparent white supremacist...". I don't mean to condone white supremacists, but what relevance does this have to his use of spam? The white supremacist angle is never mentioned again in the article. If the spam he'd sent had contained white supremacist views, that would be relevant, but the article doesn't bring up any such thing. I'm therefore struck by the notion that its inclusion is an attempt to predispose the reader to disliking the subject of the article, and that seems unacceptible. Why not start out the article with a list of everything he's ever done wrong, like speeding tickets, smoking dope, or reeking of BO? Perhaps because it'd make the irrelevancy obvious even to the less astute. It doesn't matter if I dislike white supremacists; if we let this kind of journalistic tack go unnoticed, we will be on the end of the same pitchfork sooner or later (words like "hacker", "unpatriotic", "anti-corporate"). Don't let it happen... take notice.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
To put things in perspective...
For those of you comparing the maximum sentences for robbery, theft, arson, assualts and so on to this guy's maximum sentence, I'd like to point something out.
That maximum sentence quoted is for a summation of each count of the offense. You cause several tens of thousands of smaller offenses, and you can get charged for each and every one of them.
If I went to a bank, robbed it, and shot every person in sight with my fully automatic machine gun, and took out vehicles with my handy-dandy grenade launcher, then I could conceivably be charged for each individual death, destruction property, theft, assault and so on. The _maximum_ sentence for that kind of thing could very easily exceed several hundred years in prison (capital punishment notwithstanding).
Granted IANAL, but I do know enough of the US justice system to say the above with confidence.
===========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I don't know what you're complaining about, but this is a Good Thing(TM). If we can connect spam with lots of other illegal/immoral behavior, like the RIAA is connecting P2P with child porn, we can get public support on our side and get an anti-spam federal law into place.
I agree about killing all spammers. But... was this guy REALLY a spammer? He wasn't sticking it to people like you and me. He was directly annoying some very powerful people. I think THAT'S why the penalty is so steep. Because of our twisted version of capitalism, people like the spam king, Ralsky, will never see this kind of penalty. Basically because in our society, if there is money to be made, the method doesn't matter in the least. We've all sent off the threatening/annoying anonymous e-mails with anonymizers and using rooted boxes in the past, but that is NOT spam. This guy wasn't trying to "make money fast" or "get big penis". He was simply voicing an unpopular set of opinions at a group of people who didn't want to listen. Said group had the money and the power to "get him" and I'm sure they'll win in the end. Yet more proof that capitalism is as corrupt as communism ever was.
Un-news
"Your honor, I don't think I can do 471 years"
"That's O.K. son, just do what you can."
Personaly I think if we execuited a few hundred spammers, put their heads on stakes, and took their families out of the gene pool too, it would send a pretty clear message to the rest of them and the problem would go away.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Having said that, I feel that malicious domain forging should be specifically addressed. Make no mistake, it is an assault and can do some real damage. Getting "joe-jobbed" does the following:
- Overloads your mail servers/inbox
- Damages potential business relations with potential and current clients.
- Wastes a huge amount of time to clean up the damned mess it creates.
- Repeated job jobbing can result in loss of connectivity because the victim's ISP no longer wishes to deal with the problem.
- Can provoke electronic and personal attacks from ill-infomed joe-job email recipients
From someone who's been joe'd before, it is utterly frustrating to deal with. Spammers know this and have been using it as a weapon to silence voices who cry out against them (see monkeys.com, doxdesk.com, other anti-spam sites and resources).A more reasonable punishment would be something like 5 years in the clink, forfeiture of all computer assets, and a very stiff fine - preferably payable to the damaged party.
Never one to question the technical accuracy of a major media news article... However, I wonder if they really have evidence that he hacked into their computers to send the emails or if they think that that was the only way to accomplish the feat. Just because I make a crank phone call and claim to be Joe Schmoe, doesn't mean that I broke into Mr. Schmoe's house to make the call! [Unless they have caller id evidence that the call was made from there].
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
A friend of mine is the webmaster of PhilaPhans.com, and was also affected by Allan Carlson's activities. He pointed me to this little note (scroll down to "Elysian Valley, Burbank"), where the guy's name pops up again:
Virginia de la Torre found a hate message in Aug. tucked inside a frozen chicken dinner. Robert Kennedy, a Long Beach lawyer representing the California Grocers Association says that since 1992, there have been more than 800 incidents of hate messages found inside products sold in stores in Ventura, Los Angeles and Orange counties. "You name the store, you name the product, and they've been hit," he said. "The slurs are against Jews and blacks and Hispanics. It's an ongoing problem." A Los Angeles Superior Court judge issued an injunction against Allan Eric Carlson of Glendale, prohibiting him from putting such pamphlets into packages in any of the 1,100 stores in the three-county area that are members of the grocers association. Carlson had been arrested and is on probation for two similar incidents; in one he vandalized notebooks and books with WAR [White Aryan Resistance] stickers and stamps; in a second, he assaulted a school custodian after being caught stuffing flyers into student lockers in Simi Valley.
So there you have it. Like McSpew said, he's a crank and a racist.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Spammers and other net vermin (cowards all) cause a small to moderate amount of harm to millions of people. They are getting away with it because they are not held accountable.
If the harm product of Spammers and other shitheads (defined as harm * number of victims) were held constant, and the number of victims reduced, to say 10 thousand people, then spammers would be hanging from electric poles in every neighborhood.
If a person hurts one other person, then they deserve punishment. When spammers and joe jobbers hurt millions of people, that punishment should be multiplied..
I personally favor eating spammers brains while they are still alive ( a lot like raw oysters, actually, with a wedge of lemon or a splash of tabasco) but then again I am a moderate softie, and my friends and coworkers make fun of me for being such a wuss.
While I obviously agree with the notion of the punishment fitting the crime, I also think a message needs to be sent to the dorks that take part in this sort of anti-social behavior.
Not to be melodramatic or anything, but if you ask me, clowns like this contribute more to the "downfall of society" than the murderers, rapists, etc. In life, I'm not worried about being murdered or raped precisely because, for the most part, the murderers and rapists are in prison. On the other hand, I am worried (and highly annoyed) by the spammers, h4x0rz, script kiddies, etc., that pull this kind of crap because they think it's funny and because THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT. Ultimately, my quality of life is impacted (in terms of lost time, money, etc.) more by these computer dipshits who get their giggles by doing this stuff, and DOS attacks, and letting loose blaster worms, and stealing important source code, and all this computer nonsense.
Yes, some of these things are more terrible than others. But frankly, they're all born from the same mind. The same punk kid who pulls this spamming crap probably runs with the crowd of dorks that take part in more nefarious computer acts. So send a message! I can live without fear of being murdered or raped, yet I have to put up with this? THAT's annoying.
Society IS helped by getting rid of these jerks.
Did he send all of this mail from his house? I'm interested so I can avoid getting caught the next time I go crazy and spam.
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The rest was for being a die-hard Phillies fan. Come on.
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Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 20:58:52 -0800
From: The Angry Phan
Subject: Lieberthal Stabs Scottie in Back?
To: cstuart at longyear.acs.nmu.edu
Reply-to: Phan@alt.sports.baseball.phila-phillies.com
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Well, it appears that we have a controversy. I don't know that we have a
controversy in the "newspapers" or on the radio, or on the TV, but we have a
controversy on the Internet where we are all free to discuss what is what
about anything. You can be a gas station attendant or an Ivy League graduate
or something in-between, but if you have something you want to say and the
balls to say it and enough brains to find a place to say it you can, at least
for now.
Paula Hagen, as someone referred to him the other day, claims in today's
Daily News that Mike Lieberthal is happy to be a Phillie. Paula Hagen not
only claims that "Lieby" is happy to be a Phillie but Paula puts quotes
around Lieby's supposed remarks that make Mike Lieberthal into a liar and
back stabber.
Scott Rolen has stood up as a man and challenged this ownership and city in a
way that is much stronger than Curt Schilling ever thought to do. Rolen has
done so after Lieberthal said publicly in September, 2000 in a Paula Hagen
column that the Phillies needed a, well let's look at the quote again in its
entirety:
"What we need is a $15 million slugger to put right in the middle of the
lineup."
Well, according to Paula Hagen in today's Daily News of January, 17, 2002
Mike Lieberthal has said something diametrically opposite to the above. In
fact "Lieby" has fired the first shot at organizing a battery night sendoff
for Scott Rolen. Here is what he said according to Paula Hagen:
"It's funny because they tell me about the lineups that the Mets and Braves
have," he said. "And I say, 'How about the Phillies' lineup? Jimmy Rollins,
Bobby Abreu, Scott Rolen, Pat Burrell?'
Then "Lieby" supposedly follows this up with:
"The only thing I can say is that it would be nice to have a No. 1 starter,
somebody like Curt Schilling."
Really? Just back as far as the end of the 2000 season, gee that's not much
longer than a year ago, "Lieby" said that Pat Burrell was three years away
from being "a stud", but now suddenly that time table has been rushed forward
and the guy who put it all on the line in America's toughest city, Scott
Rolen, has been hung out to dry by "Lieby".
That's the way it is unless "Lieby" seeks out another "writer" at the Daily
News or Inquirer and sets the record straight about what he said.
Either Paula Hagen is lying, or Mike Lieberthal is a piece of shit.
I wonder what could have changed "Lieby's" mind? Did Ed Wade whisper into
"Lieby's" ear "Ya know Mike, I don't like to talk about trade discussions,
but your name came up this winter and well, there just wasn't a lot of
interest in someone that has your injury record. Ya know what I mean? It's a
tough market." Long pause.
"Well look, you see what we did for Dougie. We didn't need to do that. You
have a lot more potential, you have been around. You can become the "team
leader", the "veteran". Larry knows how to spin the clich?s that the Phans
will listen to. That could be you. We can coast you into retirement as a
lifetime Phillie. All you have to do is cooperate. You help us with our
problem, and we help you with yo
help out.
I can't believe what a police state we've become in the US. Anything more than 463 years would be a gross miscarriage of justice.
It's not that the penalty for spamming is harsher than the penalty for other crimes, it is that the penalty is per offense try committing 160,000 acts of assualt or murder, and then see what the maximum penalty is... would you beleive 160,000 consecutive life sentences? How 'bout 480,000 years?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
why do I find this sooo damn funny....
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Summary execution would be more humane & more in keeping with the crime...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
His excuse in court: "Verisign Made Me Do It!"
Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
...but trust me, having at least linear punishment (3x the crime => at least 3x the punishment) is very useful. Here in Norway, we have a law that I'd basicly call the "quantity dicount law" which means that you'll by default get less punishment than the sum of your crimes taken separately.
Frankly, the results of it are silly. If you've got e.g. 10 outstanding shoplifting charges already, your 11th will add almost nothing to your punishment because even though there's one more charge, you get less for each. In other words, once you've become a criminal, keep up!
Of course, I don't think this guy is concerned about the 472nd year in prison, so it has pretty much lost its effect. But for punishments inside a normal lifespan, I'd say it's fairly effective. Then you can use common sense (what judges and juries are for) to do reasonable corrections, as I'm sure they will in this case.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ah, yes, but what does "hacked" mean in this context? As far as I can tell, it means that he went through open SMTP servers -- ugly, nasty but also a pretty generous definition of "hack," as most on /. will probably agree. (Next up on Channel 8 at 11, "'Ping:' Harmless ICMP toy or virtual carjacker?")
Furthermore, there's a fundamental confusion in the indictment: after stating that the defendant went out and harvested e-mail addresses, the indictment charges him with launching a DDoS attack because of the bounces from incorrect addresses! (In other words: he expended effort to find valid e-mail addresses, but then is charged with deliberately saturating SMTP servers with bounced e-mails.) Yes, you could certainly make a nice tort case out of the fact that he recklessly sent thousands of e-mails out to addresses that had a high probability of being incorrect (depraved heart, yes), but there's a certain lack of mens rea in his acts.
As for other posters who say that the defendant is getting his due -- yes, this guy's a troll, a racist, an ex-con and a Phillies fan, but that doesn't mean that a conviction under these circumstances is a good precedent. It is when our civil liberties protect the legal acts of unpleasant people that our legal system truly shines.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Because your name, birthday and address are such a secret, right?
The problem isn't the release of that information - the idiot is anyone who accepts name, address and birthdate as proof that you're you.
paintball
"Maximum penalties: 471 years in federal prison, $117 million in fines."
That's the fine and penalties when your spam hurts some high-profile, moneyed public figure. If the guy had forged the e-mail address of some average Joe, we wouldn't be reading about it here. If he had caused you or I to get 160,000 bounces and numerous angry e-mails, we would have been lucky to get his ISP to issue a warning -- much less get the FBI investigating and prosecuting.
I'll be impressed when the same level of interest is shown when some poor sap at home is the victim. But I'm not holding my breath.
Prison is for people dangerous to society. Murderers, rapists, other assorted thugs.
Lots of arguments about how prison doesn't "work" for these people either, though. If you take the arguement that prison is there to deter crime ("don't do this, or you'll get spanked"), it is very arguable that prison-as-a-punishment/deterrant works much better for 'white-collar' criminals - people who *are* afraid of it - than the murderers, rapists, and other assorted thugs. Most spammers would probably piss their pants if they knew they were going to prison - after a few high-profile 'examples'.
OK, so he gets 471 years in prison. That's much more than he can ever serve, so why not just kill him instead? The death penalty would certainly seem a cheaper solution than keeping someone incarcerated for 50 or 60 years until they die of natural causes. Anyone serving a life sentence or a length longer than 50 or 60 years should really just be taken to the gas chamber as soon as possible to clear out space and ease up on our prison system.
Have you ever spent any time in jail? It isn't a joke and not for people that are mere nuisances. Nothing but serious business behind those walls. I'd prefer prisoners to be a danger to society, not just guilty of being an asshole.
under the name mike_schmidt. Do a groups search for
mike_schmidt SCAM
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
he didn't just spoof "a from: header". he spoofed several from: addresses, including an FBI address, and send hundreds of thousands of rather offensive emails, including one with the subject "EAT SHIT AND DIE".
yeah, i say let him rot. 400+ years is a bit much, but let him rot anyway.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Yes, the maximum sentence is high. Will he actually be sentenced to 471 years in prison? Of course not. In all likelihood, he'll cop a plea for a nasty fine and "don't touch a computer for 10 years" or maybe a little prison time. If it actually does make it to trial, a judge isn't going to give him 471 years either.
It's simple - the punishment for doing the crime once needs to be significant so that people don't do it a handful of times. That means that if you do the crime 10,000 times, you're going to have a pretty large maximum sentence. But that's better than the alternative, where sending 10,000 messages nets you 2 years instead of 471, so 100 instances of forgery is only worth a few days.
paintball
This guy is hate monger and uber racist POS. He has a history of racist acts and arrests.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
General clark is paraphrasing Himmler (along with other NAZI sources).
(Clark had to join the Democrats once he uttered his version. There's no longer a chance he could collect enough Republican primary votes to secure a presidential nomination.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Give him some webmail account that he can access over dialup from prison. Publish that email far and
wide so it'll end up on every spam list in the world.
Then, tell him that once a year he'll get an email with a password that if he gives the prison guard, he can leave at any time.
This email can come in any form, with any subject heading, very likely disguised as spam. His webmail account will also have a 5Mb limit, and if the email bounces because it just happens to come when the mailbox is full, he'll have to wait for the next year.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
The spoofed messages always appeared to be coming from someone named "Pissed Off Phan," with a return address matching a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
I sincerely wish I'd saved the text of some of them. The were uniformly well written, however, devoid of the usual spelling mistakes you come to expect in unsolicited e-mail. Of course, the author was motivated not by greed, but by vitriol: the only thing which separated his message from a bona-fide editorial was his pathological hatred of Larry Bowa. In fact, I came close to firing off an angry e-mail to the folks at philly.com before thinking to check the full headers.
Well, fines aren't meant to be indicitive of what monetary damages were done, but are rather meant to be set at a level high enough to keep you from doing it. The last time I got caught speeding, I didn't do $80 in damages to anyone, but I still got ticketed for that.
As for the jail time, he won't serve anywhere close to that. Even if he gets the maximum sentence on each count, those sentences will almost certainly be served concurrently, not consecutively. It's not uncommon for white collar crimes to add up to rediculously high maximum jail terms, because they usually involve violating a whole bunch of different laws. It's easy to be guilty of 300 counts of fraud, but a lot harder to be guilty of 300 counts of murder. On the other hand, 300 counts of fraud will in almost every case be served concurrently, and 300 counts of murder would very likely be served consecutively.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Consider the 100,000 recipients that were also victimized. $1,170 per victim does not seem outrageous to me.
Spam penalties should be proportionate to the number of people affected by the act. If you send a million emails, you should do at the very least a year in jail in my opinion.
Our penal system doesn't evaluate price-effectiveness when considering between punishments (thank goodness, a bullet is pretty much the cheapest way of delivering "justice" yet found).
Two things about life in prison. First, having him rot in jail is a worse punishment than killing him would be (IMHO). Second, we have the chance later to say that he was innocent or we otherwise feel that he should be pardoned and he gets to be set free. That's a lot harder to do when you killed him ten years ago. Posthumous pardons don't quite have the same upside.
Regards,
Ross
Wesley: "To the pain" means the first thing you lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists, next your nose.
Humperdink: And then my tongue, I suppose, I killed you too quickly the last time, a mistake I don't mean to duplicate tonight.
Wesley: I wasn't finished! The next thing you lose will be your left eye, followed by your right.
Humperdink: And then my ears, I understand! Let's get on with it!
Wesley: WRONG! Your ears you keep and I'll tell you why. So that every shreik of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out "dear God, what is that thing?" will echo in your perfect ears. That is what "the pain" means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
If you can claim over $5k in damages, they'll take a look at it. If you can claim $Millions in damages, they'll actually work on it. The article doesn't say what their actual claim of damages was (the pdf just states that they aggregated more than the $5k trigger). That's why they went after him.
And by the way, prison is for people who break the law. It's part rehab; but mostly it's punishment. I for one, hope it stays that way. This guy especially doesn't need skills to succeed; he's obviously got the skill to pull joe-jobs, which means he's smart enough to earn a living in some fashion (and indeed, I think he probably was earning a living when he committed the crime.) He needs to be punished for breaking the law.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
" I hate to tell you this but it's not illegal to call someone a "nigger" or anything else. It's called speech, as in free, not as in beer. If it were illegal to call someone a "nigger" 99.9% of all blacks would be in prison, seems that's their favorite thing to call EACH OTHER.."
The BBC recently published an article all about the N word which makes the distinction between it's use as a racial slur and term of endearment when ending in er and a. It also mentions who uses it, who doesn't, and has includes various opinions on it too.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
The poor suffering bastard has been punished enough.
Upon first conviction: A week in Philadelphia
Upon second conviction: Two weeks in Philadelphia
Under the "three strikes" law: A lifetime in Philadelphia.
The Death pentilty is always more expensive than life in prison. Those that use it do so because they want to set an example for others. "You too could die if you were really really bad." The cost of a mistake is high, so lawyers (some of whom hate the death penilty enough to work for free!) will appeal every point, (there is some gaurentee that the courts will look at them, but I'm not sure exactly what) at great cost to the state. In a clear cut most evil person with no shread of remorse case, the death penitly can barely happen 10 years after the origional trial. We don't want to accidently get the wrong person. (Not that we succede, but we give it a good effort)
Life in prision is much easier to deal with. Lawyers don't care about you (other than for money), so it is harder to get one to take your appeal seriously. Just take the criminal, lock them up, feed them a few times a day, and make sure they have minimal living standards. Sure you have to pay gaurds, and heat the building and the like, but those costs are cheap compared to the cost of lawyers defending appeals.
Yes, and it costs a lot of money to keep these people in prison too. Let's see, I'll keep my share of the taxes to keep this guy in prison and run the risk that he might spam me. I'm ok with that.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
Although in America not much critical thought is given to the best way to punish criminals (not much critical thought given to laws either) with non-violent crimes such as this one a wider range of options are available instead of prison. Maybe Ethics courses, extremely restricted computer access, public servitude, or strictly monetary fines would be better. Why throw away $40k a year to keep a spammer away from a computer in prison (i don't think they have those yet) when you could just force him or her to tell all future neighbors with an email address of their past history?
Posthuman since 2001.
Maybe he'll get to write a folk song about it.
Yeah, but he'll be going to a minimum security white-collar RESORT. He should BE so lucky. He'll even get conjugal visits.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
He's been spamming people in his community with white supremacist propaganda for a while now. Kind of funny, actually.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I can't say I blame them for arresting this guy (although the idiotic federal multipliers for sentencing are almost silly), but isn't this just another lame PR exercise? This guy was just pissed, not a deliberate long-term spammer -- it was a one off offense, and while deserving of punishment it unfortunately will give the impression the FBI is doing something about it, when it clearly isn't.
What a long time to be on lockdown! I would hate to be his cellmate, considering he annoys people for a living.
When will we learn that you can't apply traditional laws that are designed to scale in a linear way to the Internet where you can effect such different orders of magnitude?
/.ers have been saying...
It just doesn't work. How do you apply traditional laws to some hypothetical situations...
If I send 10 fake emails but they cause all 10 computers to erase themselves.
If I sent 100 fake emails? 1,000,000? 1,000,000,000? If i managed to send a billion emails its certainly worse than a million, but do I deserve 1000x the punishment?
What about if I send a 1Million but they all bounce off of some well setup server, which barely notes a blip in the logs and it doesn't really effect it? What if I send 10,000 but they all have huge attachments that crashes a server? Is this the same?
My point is what many other
#1 The punishment should fit the crime.
#2 Jail time is an outmoded punishment for non-violent internet crimes.
Someone I work with found one of those. I remember there was a flurry of news articles for about three days and then nothing. I don't recall if he was caught at the time.
Nice to see he's moved his hate into the new milennium. Leaflets are so 20th century.
Hey! I joke! Clam down!
--- Ban humanity.
...the government does. Ideally, the government would be able to lower the taxes of law-abiding citizens by the amount collected from law-breakers, but that doesn't actually happen.
If someone costs you money unlawfully, you have the right to sue the person. You don't need a precedent to sue someone. A precedent is a guide for a judge to make his decision by, so he doesn't actually have to think too much about the case.
My other first post is car post.
He is entitled to a jury of his peers, and it's going to take them forever to figure out where 12 spammers are.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
The guy could have raped, pillaged and murdered and still do less jail time / fines.
Really? How much did the last criminal accused of 160,000 counts of rape or murder get?
But, is the punishment fitting for the crime? What punishment will the CEOs/CFOs of Enrons, Worldcoms, etc. get compared to this misguided fool? Sure this Phillies fan sent out tons of spam, but unlike Ken Lay, he didn't bilk people out of billions of dollars.
Yeah, but he'll be going to a minimum security white-collar RESORT. He should BE so lucky. He'll even get conjugal visits.
Which is more than most SlashDot readers get OUTSIDE the prison walls.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Ah, the beauty of the US "point system" penalties.
He's probably accused of mail fraud. A minor offense, maximum penalty: One night in prison.
Per case.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Do you really think that rape is an apropriate punishment for any crime, if so why not make it at public spectacle. Then I'm sure it will really scare all the criminals into law abiding citicens.
It is sickening the way people on slashdot seem to find the barbaric conditions of the american prison system one big joke. Do you really think that you are immune to the justice system, and that you never ever could end up in prison yourself - The same way every heroin addict never believed that he could be addicted, when he tried that first fix.
Rape is not a joke, no matter what the sex of the victim!
it is exactly that kind of thinking that leads to subjective sentencing and state extortion. If you've been following Ashcroft, you know that they're trying to force the courts to follow the law when sentencing and mandating minimum sentences.
If it is ridiculous to be sentenced to 471 years in jail for whatever number of disgruntled emails sent, then it should NOT BE IN THE LAW. It is the same with contracts and leases, etc, when there are wholly one-sided clauses that are just their for one party's 'protection', 'the lawyers make us put that there' -- It is the people's fault for not complaining when things get added or signed into law in the first place.
The point is, for a system of law to be effective and respected, it has to be consistent and fair. If the sentencing is the judge's discretion, then you deal with issues of race and sexuality & politics, etc. But if they are included into the law in the first place, and everyone agrees, then everyone can agree later to accept the punishments or work to change them again. If you want room for extenuating circumstances, think of what they could be, and add them into the law. It may make for a wordy penal code, but the clarity will help prevent discrimination and promote a sense of equality in the people.
It is ridiculously simple to influence the politicians, as you saw with the Do-not-call registry. All you have to do is contact them. They even make it easy for you, they give you their phone number, address, and email address. If a large enough amount of people want something, they do it, because above-all, they don't want to lose their seat.
Don't forget that's the MAXIMUM penalty. For every bounced e-mail there is a certain penalty, they add up and form a maximum penalty. A judge will set a MUCH MUCH lower penalty based on the crime and the damage done. The only reason the penalty was so high is because everything is automated, it's a lot easier for a computer to commit a crime 160,000 times.
If you made a script that raped or murdered 160,000 people your maximum penalty would be quite high too. I think it's about 4 million years in prison for 160,000 second degree murder charges. And I think the minimum sentence for 160,000 rape charges would be a bit under 3 million years. It wasn't that the penalty for this persons crimes should be over 400 years in prison, it's just that the maximum penalties add up to that and the fines also just happen to add up to over 100 million.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Switch to a government run program to eliminate waste and finger pointing??? You must live in a different country than the US.
The punishment does not fit the crime. If this is a crime, it's not worth having. So the philly inq had a bad email day. So what! If they knew anything about there mail system they could have stop it. A misconfigured script or program could cause as much "damage". "damage" - has anything been broken at the philly inq? No. This not a crime but a issue for the civil courts if that. These laws, legislators who enact them, and prosecutors who argue them are STUPID STUPID STUPID!
Did you really believe that Eldred v. Ashcroft would fail?
Did you really think copyrights would be extended indefinitely for wealthy content-owners?
Did you ever think corporate giants could shrug off antitrust convictions?
Did you really think the star of Jingle All The Way would be Governor of California?
Wake up, not everyone with a contrarian point is a pot-smokin' patchouli-smellin' hippie, Donald.
--- What
Re:A very (ludicrous, retarded, draconian) precede (Score:4, Insightful)
by EdgeShadow (665410) on Wednesday October 08, @02:56PM (#7165798)
The penalties aren't for the spam he sent, but rather for spoofing the sender's address. Many (hundreds of thousands) of the spam emails he sent out were to bad/non-existent addresses, and were bounced back to the real addresses he faked as his own. The people who received the "returned" emails are suing him, not those that got spammed.
No, you don't get jail time for a lawsuit.
These appear to be criminal charges.
I have a mail server that I run at home. I setup all sorts of mail accounts so that I know who or where I submitted an emial address to...
for example: bills@ sbc@ ebay@ etc....
This way i know what email address of mine any given company may have.
I had been having some problems with a car that my wife bought and was in contact with the DMV (Californis) fraud department regarding this car dealer. The email that I was using was DMV@[my home domain].com in order to track all emails to and from on this subject.
I received a Cease and Desist letter from the head counsil for DMV CA - telling me that I cannot "confuse the public" through the use of DMV in my email address. They stated that they will "agressively defend" their brand.
I asked Slashdot (rejected) about this - as it would set a very interesting precident if it were to go into a full legal battle. Who can own an email address. What if my name David M. Verovich or some such thing.
Anyone that knows anything about email knows how using *@domain.com has no visibilty to the "Public" in that there would be slim to none chance of people confusing the email address that I use to correspond WITH the DMV with an actual DMV address...
Here's hoping he gets sent to this kind of prison.
That isn't 170 million in damages, dude. That's 170 million in FINES. Each count has a maximum penalty both in jail time and in monetary fines. It's not a civil case so damages are not rewarded.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
At least his home addess is given in the indictment......... why don't we just sign him up to lots of mail orders and stuff.....
There are many levels of incarceration. They don't usually put the squishy white computer geeks in with the hardcore gang bangers.Unless they're bored. ;)
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Commit one murder or a few murders and you're going to prison for life at least.
Commit 160,000 murders, you're the leader of a country and are hailed as a hero.
>> "Maximum penalties: 471 years in federal prison, $117 million in fines."
:^)
Maybe a bit excessive - I'd say around half that would fit the crime
160,000? that's it. no problem. you can delete that much mail in time. what's the problem. you could even write a script in 2 minutes to deal with those mails over a longer period of time.
...introduced a wave of new registration including...
OK, funny either way, but was that r a typo or were you poking fun at some folks probrems pronouncing certain letters?
He can pay the fines after he gets out of jail...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
When he gets out in 2471, society better watch out.
Sounds like the tagline to a Demolition Man sequel...
Main Entry: scatology
Pronunciation: ska-'ta-l&-jE, sk&-
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek skat-, skOr excrement; akin to Old English scearn dung, Latin muscerdae mouse droppings
Date: 1876
1 : interest in or treatment of obscene matters especially in literature
2 : the biologically oriented study of excrement (as for taxonomic purposes or for the determination of diet)
Already been tried. On atheists.
This would make sense, *IF* you could write laws in advance that would correctly take into account the particular circumstances of every crime in the future.
But you can't.
There's a penalty for doing a crime once, and it needs to be a penalty significant enough to deter people from doing that crime. If, by means of automation, a criminal manages to do the crime 10,000 times, then they're going to be eligible for a nasty maximum sentence. That's just the way it has to work. The prosecutor and judge are then responsible for making sure the punishment fits the crime.
You're trying to argue that the law should stand on its own. It does not. The law is only part of the system, and does not, and CAN NOT, work correctly without the other parts. Expecting the law, on its own, to work correctly all, or even most, of the time, is completely silly.
paintball
Could have murdered them all and got less jail time!
The same sort of potential penalties could be applied to fax broadcasters or even telemarketers if they were brazen enough to get the attention of the district attorneys. Usually the victim would settle with the broadcaster out of court for some lesser penalty or the DA and defense will negotiate a plea-bargain (the courts are very busy and trials are expensive, so the DA always has a good incentive to plea-bargain to prevent a case like this from going to court).
Just a quick question: if you find a script kiddie who's been DOSing your site (let's say he's 12) can you sue him for damages? Would the parents get blamed and have to pay for damages?
Prison is also for thieves, pick-pockets, shop-lifters, burglars, and the like.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That our laws are not just for punishment. They are also to deter. Think about it this way; lets say I have a 50% chance of getting caught if I mug somebody (hey, there are cameras everywhere and the victim can make a positive ID).
If the penalty is (I'm making stuff up here) $10,000, then I'd only want to rob somebody if I can make off with $5,000. Thus, I'd only be on the lookout for blind billionares.
But, spamming is much harder to catch. You don't have to be anywhere special to spam (you don't have to reveal your identity unless you're an idiot). So let's say there's a 1% chance of getting caught. Thus, if the fine is $10,000, then I'll only spam if I can get 100 back. Not so hard.
So, we can either increase the probability of getting caught (pretty hard) or increase the fine (just pass a law - very easy). So if we make the fine $500,000, then I'll spam only if I can get $5,000 out of it.
Thus, you deter spammers to the same extent as you deter muggers. It just sounds strange when it's applied to an idividual.
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Yeah, but did you watch the Phillies this year? Burrell, Mesa, and a bunch of sorry no-account losers. This guy should be hailed as a hero in Philly for taking down the stupid newspapers who duped us into thinking the Fightin Phils were any good...
As a victim of this guy's antics, I say it's about time this guy is put behind bars. My dad, who runs the software business for which I handle IT, was impersonated by this guy after proving the guy wrong on a couple of points on the old forum on the Phillies' homepage. Apparently this ticked the guy off, and he went on a forged usenet post rampage, posting spam messages appearing to come from our company, as well as trying to portray my dad as a child pornographer. It was all we could do to stop the flood of bad PR coming our way. After the guy started impersonating reporters and Phillies officials, the FBI got involved, and my dad was able to give them information about what IP address he was posting from, what ISP he used, etc.
Click here for a thread on a forum that I run that has more details on some of this guy's antics.
Did you read the article? He sent hundreds of thousands of copies of the message to people like you and me. It's just that he used the newspaper's return address. So they got all the bounces. And that's what got them up in arms.
I'm thrilled about this precedent. Someone has been using my domain name to send spam for several months now, and I've easily collected 100,000 bounces. This motivates me to get out there and figure out who it is.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Last week I was getting bombarded by over 100 bounced spam messages an hour thanks to a spammer using my email address as a reply-to address in the forged header of his v1agra sales pitches.
I was getting these because I have a domain where I have set up mail forwarding for about a dozen email addresses, and anythingElse&myDomain.org goes to my own email account. So the spammer was bombarding the world with messages, each one with a different reply-to address (generated at random) but they all had my domain. All the undelivered messages were getting bounced to my email account. I fixed the problem by forwarding everythingElse@myDomain.org to a non-existant domain.
Now, what happens if the failed delivery notifications themselves get bounced and the email server at the intended victim's ISP gets swamped? Am I in trouble or is it the spammer that's responsible? I can't think of any other way I could have protected myself.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
No matter if it hurt a newspaper or a private citizen: precedent.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I wish I had mod points ...
We need a moderation option (+1, Understands what's going on)
That would be 2474 (this is 2003 ya know).
ever hear of Godwin's Law ?
Yep. But then there's Santayana's law:
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Combine them and you get:
"Godwin's law is very convenient for neo-NAZIs."
Because someone can be counted on to raise the Godwin red-herring whenever a neo-NAZI posts and is called on it. OR (as I HOPE is this case) when someone infected with one of the many nicey-nice seeming memes that the NAZIs ran into the ground repeats it, and the actual history and problems with the meme are ponted out. "Gun control" is one such meme.
The problem is that there are a LOT of ideas that sound nice at first. But when you actually try to implement them you get unintended consequences - often exactly the opposite of the effect you were trying to achieve. If you were trying to cause something good, you end up causing something bad. If it's not clear what is happening you may try to solve the increased problem by applying more of the poisoned medicine, in a positive-feedback loop.
Meanwhile, if the consequence YOU didn't intend is useful to those in control of the government and/or the media, they may encourage more of the "solution" - and suppress the evidence needed for you (and the rest of the population) to recognize the second-order effect that makes the "solution" the problem.
The NAZIs are a convenient history lesson, because they built their regime in this way on SEVERAL nice-sounding ideas - and ran them into the ground to the tune of millions dead.
One of the nice-sounding ideas is gun bans, and the Himmler quote that Clark paraphrased is one form of that meme. The nice-sounding meme: "Guns hurt and kill. Geting rid of guns will stop the hurting and killing. (Murder, robbery, rape, etc. will be reduced.)" But among the unintended consequences are a RISE in murder, robbery, rape, etc. - because guns defend more than they assault. And a far greater one is genocide - because privately-held guns are essentially the only defense against it once someone in power gets the idea into his head.
Of course the REAL meaning of Godwin's Law is that the mention of the NAZIs is a flag that the thread has diverted from its original topic into one of the stock debates. And indeed this has happened here.
But I maintain that, both in this thread and in general, the diversion occurs in the post BEFORE the NAZIs are mentioned. I maintain further that preventing the repeat of this piece of history (under some name other than NAZIs) is so important that it makes sense to nip these memes in the bud - with a single posting - whenever they resurface.
And finally I maintain that the misquoting of Godwin's Law in an attempt to suppress such history lessons by social pressure is another such meme, which is SO dangerous that it also rates a single - and much longer - followup.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Prison is for people dangerous to society. Murderers, rapists, other assorted thugs.
Wrongo-bongo! Many people disagree, in particular: a majority of both houses of the legislature and the president of the United States.
Prison is for those for whom the legislature has said it is for.
Many of the messages Carlson is accused of sending were obscene and scatological;
Isn't calling spam "obscene" redundant?
Chip H.
Geez, buddy ... I hate spam as much as anything else but equating one spam to one murder is a bit extreme, don't you think?
... we're still looking for Saddam Hussein.
Besides
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
> Did you really believe that Eldred v. Ashcroft would fail?
Yes.
> Did you really think copyrights would be extended indefinitely for wealthy content-owners?
Yes. Business as usual. Politicians (of all stripes) are in the pockets of contributers.
Did you ever think corporate giants could shrug off antitrust convictions?
Yes. See above.
> Did you really think the star of Jingle All The Way would be Governor of California?
No. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised!
> Wake up, not everyone with a contrarian point is a pot-smokin' patchouli-smellin' hippie.
Nor are they a wild-eyed, shotgun-totin' racist redneck. I was just concerned about the public health. All this serious knee jerking could cause injuries and drive up the cost of healthcare!
I'm glad they finally shut down this annoying person, as I was one of the people who kept getting his rants. [So if 100,000 messages bounced back, how many of them went through?]
Here's a sample of one of his rants ...
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Hey,
I just got out of jail -- one week for second DWI in 10 years (first being 7 years ago). We played cards and ping pong, worked out, watched TV, exchanged e-mails and URLs. REAL serious, we didn't have computers. Cellmates included a computer programmer, a graphics designer, a network admin, two engineers, a construction company owner, a highschool guidance counselor etc... All in for DWI or personal drug possession. Ya, real effing scarey felons. It's nice that you don't associate with those who have neither driven after a couple drinks nor touched an illegal substance. I wish I new what saintly universe you lived in, dipwad.
Did you ever think you would see the day where claiming the source of an email address that did not happen to be yours would be a crime?
SMTP has no concept of authenticating the source email address of an email message.
There are already laws on the books for all material crimes and damages that happen to be performed using the net as the medium.
Libel if you use the source address to libel people. Fraud if you use it to defraud people. Monetary damages if you intentionaly reverse-triggered a DDOS on someone.
AND the rest? Thats the price you pay for being on a network where convenience is the goal. Dont like it, get off. Everyone knows convenience and security do not mix well.
But 471 years on hacking charges?
This goes to underscore that the net is not some magical new world that needs new laws. What it needs is everyday laws being better enforced.
Technicaly speaking, rate-limiting bounces in mail servers would probaly prevent massive attacks like this.
When you are king, email me. I think I would like to work for you. :^)
I can find research that works in both directions actually. More and more we are finding, however, that prison is more or less ineffective as a means of rehabilitation. People who go in are fairly likely to be criminals when they come back out. A fair number of sociologists now beleive that prison doesn't make people into more hardened criminals, it simply keeps them from commiting crimes for a few months while they're in it.
The value of prisons, to society, is that they ARE a fairly effective deterrent. There is a fascinating study I read in college that tracked crimes that carry very light or no jail sentences (petty theft) and compared them to other forms of crime that we're generally less risky and easier to perpetrate, but carried stiff jail penalties. The less rewarding/more risky crime was a much bigger problem, with the biggest reason cited by those caught doing it as the belief that they wouldn't face jail time if caught.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
If sending SPAM will get you, "471 years in federal prison, $117 million in fines," then I firmly believe that the punishment for murder and rape should be reduced to five minutes in the corner with the dunce hat.
Sounds like the RIAA.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I agree. I wrote it, but it seriously deserves a (-1,Knows Google from a hole in the ground).
I've ranted about the moderation system before. Don't get me started.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
heh...
If bounced emails and 'forged' email addresses are even a part of what they're going to nail this guy for, I hope that the police are never contacted by the person who has the email address foo@foo.com...we're gonna fill the prisons.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Prison is for people dangerous to society. Murderers, rapists, other assorted thugs. Society isn't helped because a spammer is in jail.
And prisons typically are the places where criminals develop their trade by having professional criminal consultants all around them.
Great - now all those prisoners will come out of prison as trained spammers. DOH!
You Americans talk about your federal pound-me-in-the-ass prisons as if the punishment of being raped daily is somehow fitting for the bad guys. "He did a bad thing, so he deserves the worst he can get."
Are you seriously thinking this way about sending somebody to what amounts to a rape camp, and shutting them in there for the rest of their life? Seriously?
How would you look on a woman being sent to such a camp for five years, to be raped by men daily? Feel disgust when you read that and try to comprehend it - the total barbaricness of it? Then, tell me, why is it so different when a man is being sent to such an experience? On top of that, typically a heterosexual man?
The former Iraqi government used to punish bad people by rape, they say. The Iraqis, however, were not _proud_ of that.
Why are Americans?
160,000 bounced mails... less than 60 megabytes of traffic, about as much as three people running windows update or five people downloading Mozilla. Laughable. If they put people like him in the same league with Bin Laden then they should be taken outside and have their bare asses whipped with a rubber hose until they have stopped screaming and started giggling.
Wow, 99% of slashdot applaudes the laws when they're announced. Now, when these laws are applied, everybody realises that they are just ludicrously harsh (I mean, you can bugger children and you get a sentence of only a few years, with no fines).
Oh the irony. The crowd is fickle.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
Jail time? That *does* seems harsh. Admittedly, Golden Age of the Grotesque is nowhere near as good as Holy Wood. But This Is The New shit is a good song to rock to and.. oh, you mean the *other* Manson.
At the moment - maybe Super Gerosome will be invented forty years down the line and his life will be extended to the point where he can serve every damn day.
You know, Hitler, Himmler and all the other Nazis were big on the death penalty. Considering your statements, I assume that you therefore oppose the death penalty?
I do, but not because of any opinions of Nazis.
Too show the weakness of this argument: Hitler liked sports and painting. Do you oppose this?
Sometimes, even those people were right about some things, you can not always consistently be wrong.
Moritz
This is complete bullshit. No single statistic or scientific inquiry supports this. Criminality in the USA is among the highest of any Western nations and you have the most liberal gun laws. You also have the highest rate of mass killings by teenagers and so on. A privately owned gun is 5 times more likely to be used on the owner and/or on his family (suicide, accidents, family fights) than on any external criminal.
Guns kill people. The more ruthless anyone is, the more likely is it, that a gun is used. A criminal attacker is always more likely to shoot than any normal private person. Giving the criminals easy access to guns is a mistake.
Moritz
'3. As is further described in this indictment, the defendant ALLAN ERIC CARLSON violated various federal criminal statutes by "hacking," that is, gaining unauthorized access to the computers of other persons on the Internet; sending thousands of e-mail messages from the victim's computer; and "spoofing," that is, falsifying the return address of these e-mails[...]'
He's indicted for actual cracking, not just for the From: spoofing. Are we all clear on that now? You may now commence spouting your usual angry uninformed opinions.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You mean they didn't even give him a trial? You mean they just busted in and searched his place without a warrant? Just what do you mean when you say he was stripped of his rights and due process?
How can I be redundant, when I was the first post on this subject? Oh well.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
The last time I got caught speeding, I didn't do $80 in damages to anyone, but I still got ticketed for that.
:)
So, the trick is to not get caught speeding 130,000 times
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Already been tried. On atheists.
And on Christians....
And on Bahai....
And on Muslims.....
And on and on.....
Um. What was your point again?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
he must, since healthcare works better in just about every other modernized country than it does in the u.s.
1) The US still has most of the best hospitals in the world.
2) Most of the problems can be traced directly to either government regulation, corruption, or frivolous lawsuits.
3) The remaining problems are due to unionization and the fact that the medical industry requires that many people work nights and weekends.
None of these problems require government-based solutions, except for normal and traditional policing to curb corruption and perhaps some lawsuits.
I know this may sound un-intuitive, but there is a monetary value to health. The checks and balances in a market-based health care system are: 1) insurance companies want people to be healthy 2) doctors want people to be sick 3) people don't want to pay either high insurance premiums or high doctor bills. If you follow the money trail, then it forces doctors to be honest to a reasonable degree, if they want to earn a decent living.
I think most people really want to believe that doctors look out for the patient's best interests, which is unfortunate and naive. Nationalized healthcare really will only succeed in perverting the system into a form where quality and timeliness of service declines while prices at best stay the same if not go up. Nationalized healthcare will probably turn the US into a third-world country, medically speaking. Also, don't forget that political motivations will infect a national system with exclusions and allowances, and there will be a mandatory payroll deduction that carries a prison term for failure of payment. Yes, national healthcare will become a system of extortion. I hope that makes everyone really cozy.
For people that absolutely cannot afford health care, then there's always room for church missions to pick up some of the slack. There is no way to remove charity from a market system, but it simply isn't the government's job to be a philanthropist.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Your sig is a paraphrase of one of Ma Ferguson's famous quotes.
"If English was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for us." -- Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson (1875-1961), first woman governor of Texas.
How in the name of all that is righteous was that flamebait??
Suddenly there's a huge pro-spammer cabal out here in Slashdotland?
Who would feel compelled to flame me for this sentiment?
And, Christ, it was a joke anyway!
If you assigned one little hour of prision for every person spammed, every 1 million messages is another 114 years
/24 hr per day / 364 days / year = 114
;-)
1000000 offenses
The remainder can run towards leap years
- Sig
Duh? That is doesn't work!
Laws should be, whenever possible, as simple as possible.
You're arguing for non-linear punishment for linear damage, which is a bad idea for a few reasons.
Lets say, for example, that instead of punishment X for committing forgery, so total punishment is X times the number of times you commit forgery, the law is instead written so that the punishment is X, but total punishment is X times the square root of the number of infractions you commit.
So, I forge a $10,000 check, I'm liable for, say, a year in prison and a $25,000 fine. (Numbers invented for sake of argument, it's the proportion that matters.) But if I do it 10 times, the punishment is only 3 years and $75,000. If I do it 100 times, it's only 10 years and $250,000.
Note, however, that with forging 100 $10,000 checks, I made $1 million.
That's problems one and two: With any punishment where the law manadates per-instance penalty decreases with volume, you've created a situation where the reward outweighs the penalty with enough volume. Two, you've made the incrimental penalty for committing subsequent offenses small. If I've already broken the law ten times, I might as well break it 100 more times because my penalty isn't going to change much.
See, while the current system may not (intially) have the right penalty for a small offense committed numerous times, your system doesn't have the right penalty for a large offense committed numerous times either. Now, I'm sure you'll suggest that the law could be written to take this into account, but now we've just created 4 penalties where we had one before - small offense small volume, small offense large volume, large offense small volume, and large offense large volume.
Of course, we all realize that in the real world, magnitude of offense and volume of offense is hardly easily split into two categories - it's a continueum. What's worse, forging a $10,000 check once, or forging a domain tranfer form? What about 100 of each? What about a DNR order, or an affidavit? OR the from header of an email? That says you're a dick, or that asks for your credit card information on "behalf of paypal"?
No matter what you do, the judicial process is going to have to mete out punishment on a case-by-case basis. Volume of the crime is just one of the many factors, and attempting to legislate that in advance while not legislating every other factor in advance is going to get you minimal if any benefit (there's no guarantee that the foresight put into the law will work out any better than the lack thereof), while getting you more complicated, more easily manipulated, laws.
Perfect? Of course not - but what you're offering is hardly an improvement either.
paintball
How about:
"Any thread that goes on long enough will eventually end up talking about the rights and wrongs of gun control in the USA"
But among the unintended consequences are a RISE in murder, robbery, rape, etc. - because guns defend more than they assault. And a far greater one is genocide - because privately-held guns are essentially the only defense against it once someone in power gets the idea into his head.
This is complete bullshit.
I'd intended to throw out the counter-meme and leave it at that, rather than continue in a gun-control thread (as Godwin's law claims will happen). But now that the discussion is off the front page and this response will mostly be viewed only by you, I'll give you a short answer to each of your points.
No single statistic or scientific inquiry supports this.
There is some excelent (and prize-winning) research in the field of criminology that supports EXACTLY this. Interestingly, much of it was done by people who were initially looking for exactly the opposite result - but had the integrity to change their opinions in the face of data.
See Kleck (one title: Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America.) for data on offensive vs. defensive uses, or Lott et. al. (one title: More Guns, Less Crime) on the effect of gun law changes. Both books summarize years of rigorous research and analysis.
For the rest I'll just throw out the facts. If you're really interested in the evidence, or just open-minded on this issue, start by googling for "pro gun faq". (Unlike the anti-gunners, the pro-gunners are quite happy to point you to their opposition's claims. B-) )
Criminality in the USA is among the highest of any Western nations and you have the most liberal gun laws.
Our gun laws vary by location. So does our criminality. It also varies by the race, religion, and national origin of the various groups of people in question. (The US has allowed massive immigration of diverse racial, cultural, and religious groups and doesn't force its own culture(s) and language(s) on them.)
But within each of these groups the crime rate is far lower than in their country of origin. As a white male of western European ancestry my risk is lower than that of a person of similar ancestry in England, Scotland, France, or Germany. The same is true for Afro-Americans vs. Africans, Japanese-Americans vs. Japanese, Latino-Americans vs. Mexicans and other south or central Americans, and so on.
Meanwhile, since its latest experiment with draconian gun bans, England has for the last couple years been suffering from a higher violent crime rate than the US. Check it out. (Don't forget that England only counts a murder when it gets a conviction, while the US counts one when a body with signs of foul play is found.)
While you're at it, don't forget to include war. The US hasn't had a big one at home since the mid 19th century. (And violence between descendants of traditional enemies is counted as crime in the US, while it would be counted as war-related in their former homeland.)
As to "most liberal gun laws", we really don't. Switzerland, for instance, REQUIRES every adult male to have at home, at a minimum, a full-auto battle rifle, along with a sealed box of ammo (to keep it ready in case of invasion - but he is EXPECTED to buy more and practice with it). Their crime rates are considerably lower than ours. (AND they got to sit out WW II, right in the middle of it.)
You also have the highest rate of mass killings by teenagers and so on.
Just not true. The teenage killing is virtually all gang activity in certain gun-banned inner cities. And it is still small compared to that in the third-world countries where the ethnic groups in question originated.
(And it's NOT a racial characteristic. A black of African ancestry, for instance, who has achieved middle-class (or higher) income has a (miniscule) crime rate and murder risk no higher than a white of equivalent income.)
Interestingly, an Oregon city experimented with gun bans. The LA gangs moved in and set up an extort
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
First, that is a classic example of a Straw Man. You haven't argued against what Clark said. Instead, you argued against an extreme distortion of what Clark said. So what? Clark's not in favor of a complete gun ban, and neither am I. Why change the subject? I know it's sometimes impolite to introduce facts into discussions like this one, but here's what Clark actually said: Source: Interview on CNN Crossfire Jun 25, 2003
Second, can you cite any statistics to support your broad claims about unintended consequences? Certainly when you look at the gun-free societies they have a lot less assault, robbery, rape, etc. Not that I'm claiming such simple comparisons are valid, I'm just wondering if you can cite any evidence.
Third, going back to what Clark said, rather than what you find easy to argue against, what Clark says is not a gun ban, it's an assault weapon ban. Here's a little context for you. We already have a ban on privately owned rocket propelled grenade launchers, shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank rockets, and lots of other heavy duty weapons. We have a de facto ban on automatic weapons. We have an assault weapon ban from 1994 that's set to expire in 2004. We allow handguns, rifles, 'sport' guns, and pre-1994 of assault guns. In this context, can you suggest the unintended consequences of keeping the assault weapons in the disallowed category?
Fourth, we have an interesting example before us of a society that allowed gun ownership, yet the gun ownership failed to prevent either totalitarian rule or foreign invasion. I'm referring of course to Iraq. Are you ready to retire the nice-sounding meme that gun ownership == free society? I didn't think so. Why not? Well, for starters, maybe because an instance is not an argument. And maybe there's a straw man in this paragraph too. Do you appreciate being trolled any more than I do?
So instead of attacking straw men and assuming all your interlocutors are gun-phobic nutcases, why don't you try actually arguing the point in question?
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
huh? why are you attacking me when I was trying to say jail is a serious place and not to be taken lightly? I never mentioned anything else. In fact I HAVE been to jail a few times and the ones I went to weren't resorts like the one you spoke of. So obviously I don't agree with the "lock em all up" mentality.
And according to Ayres and Donohue who extended Lott's data through later years, Lott mostly managed to discover the start and end of the crack epidemic -- Crime rose and dropped just as much in urban areas without any changes in right-to-carry laws.
So you've answered my second question, and I thank you. You do have research to back up your claims; it's not good research, but at least it is research. Now how about getting rid of your straw man and dealing with what Clark actually said rather than what you find easy to argue against?
--- Often in error; never in doubt!