Anti-Spammers Win Major Court Battle

Brian Bruns writes "Well, the antispammers have won a major battle against EMarketersAmerica.org (now offline, but mirror here). The judge involved with the case has dismissed the case with prejudice, which means that all of the spammers arguments were denied. The win is a big one for the antispam community." It's always good to see my inbox come out on the winning side of a court decision. Sounds like the case was fun to watch as well.

Comments

The possible long term consquences

[MrLint]

Let hope the spammers learn a very valuable lesson here. *do*not attempt to legitimize your crap, you will end up with discovery proceedings. This will ruin hem, and possibly get them killed. The shady operators they work for dont want to be found the ISPs the contract with dont want to be found. they dont want the systems they hack to be found, they dont want to get nailed for tax evasion. In short.. dont ever stand in front of a train again. Next time you are gonna get plowed down.

Re:The possible long term consquences

[MisanthropicProggram]

I'm glad that there's some headway in shutting these people down. I hate spam as much as anyone and I resent the fact that these people feel entitled to spam us.
on the other hand, I'm afraid that down the line, some gov't or corp will use these rulings to stiffle legitimate email/free speach/ or whatever - DMCA anyone?
I'm just concerned about the long-term legal tamifications of these actions. That's all.
Or, I'm just catastrophizing - as usual.

Re:The possible long term consquences

[schon]

I'm afraid that down the line, some gov't or corp will use these rulings to stiffle legitimate email/free speach/ or whatever

Spam has nothing to do with free speech.

Free speech means "you can say whatever you want."

It does NOT mean "you can force people to listen to you", nor does it mean "you can force people to pay for your speech."

Literally ran for their lives...

[sssmashy]

Felstein, Marin & Co literally ran for their lives from our lawyer, they had a very close shave indeed and were extremely lucky the Judge accepted their pleas for dismissal.

This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but why is it that so many educated people use the word "literally" when they mean precisely the opposite?

The sentence conjures up images of screaming shysters fleeing desperately from the good guy's lawyer, who in a frenzy of righteous anger is attempting to chase them down and cut their throats. That may be how the judicial system works in Afghanistan, but not in America, the land of the Free and Non-Literal.

An idea.... Or maybe it already exists?

[Bowie J. Poag]

Idea: Lets call it Spamster... a P2P trading system set up not for warez, but explicitly for spam exchange. I know, hold on, hold on. Hear me out:

The instant you come across a piece of spam in your inbox, you can flag that piece of spam to be shared. Within a few minutes, a copy of that spam (and perhaps an MD5 fingerprint taken from random but non-specific strings extracted from the spam as well) is made available to everyone via P2P.

Meanwhile, someone on the other side of the globe a few hours later fires up his email client. As part of checking his mail, his client links up with a P2P spam hub and compares suspect contents against the list of globally known spam archetypes.

Or even more fun, have that process handled at the mailserver level. Constantly parse the spool, generaring MD5 checksums, and using those checksums as search criteria in Spamster.

Net result: The instant a piece of spam in sent, the clock starts ticking. Within a matter of minutes, that piece of spam is now indexed, and known to mail clients worldwide.

Benefits: In order to defeat the process, spam would need to be sufficiently random in it's content to overcome multiple fingerprint runs.. Something that would next to impossible (or one hell of a headache) for any would-be spammer to attempt.

Downsides: Net congestion.

Hmmmm..

Re:There are other ways to deal with spam.

[schon]

This may be a victory for the anti-spammers

No, actually, it's a victory for pretty much everyone (except spammers.)

but at what cost

None - except the attorney fees.

Why does the spam problem require government intervention?

First of all, this is not government intervention. (the spammers asked the government for intervention to stop people from using those technological 'solutions' you desire so much, then tried to back out when they saw how fscked they were.)

Second of all, it requires a social solution (which is what laws are) because it's a social problem.

Almost every problem that has come up in recent history, particularly technical challenges, have been or can be solved with technical solutions

I'm hard pressed to think of any social problem that has ever been solved by technology. Can you please list some? (There are social problems that have been eased as a side effect of technology, but none I can think of that have a technological 'solution'.)

I hardly ever lose a real email to the spam folder while only about 5% of the spam I get ever reaches my inbox

So you're OK with being raped, just because you only see it 5% of the time?

Technology can't solve the problem of spam, because the problem of spam is that spammers want something for nothing, and don't care how many people or who they have to harrass/annoy/rob to do it. There is NO technological way to change this.

This is definitely not a win for the first amendment or civil liberties

It's also definitely not a win for the homeless, the starving children in Africa, battered wives, or the endangerd California condor (all of which have as much to do with spam as the first amendment or civil liberties.) Can you please bring something relevant to the conversaion?

This is definitely not a win that is going to help keep the internet a free place.

Wrong. It MOST DEFINITELY IS a win that is going to help keep the internet a free place, because it reinforces the fact that I am allowed to control the traffic that enters my network.