Slashdot Mirror
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.
Was the lawyer constantly telling the judge he could lengthen his penis by 2-4 inches, and that he had the hottest underage beastality porn anywhere on the net.
This victory is bitter sweet. While the judge did throw the case out completely, he didn't rule that the defendants' (anti-spammers) legal costs should be paid by the plaintiff (spammers).
You can help by donating to the legal defense fund established by the SpamCon Foundation. The donations are tax deductible.
Please do donate, if you have any to spare.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
"Our real costs are less than what are quoted, but we still need money."
So what are the "real costs", then? How much do you currently have, and how much more do you require?
"Give us money" will work a lot better with a real accounting of where said money is going....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
This is fantastic, but how long till the boca raton gang move to vietnam or somewhere similar to continue their "business".
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Direct link to donating to their legal defense fund
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.
The penis enlargement pump they sold me worked so well I need the next size up. Where will I get one now? Oh well, I guess I'll use the lost pumping time to take care of that business opportunity in Nigeria ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Read some of the stuff at http://bruce.pennypacker.org/SLAPP/ if you want to see just HOW much of an idiot. The defendant's response is amusing. You don't get to LAUGH at legal papers every day.
well, you see, its like this...Myself and some friends from UC Berkeley, MIT, and McGill up north used the nice wide OC and Tx connections at our school...for a DDoS
Just kidding. I actually bombed 555 South Federal Highway, suite 450 Boca Raton Florida.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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.
Ok, I'm not a lawyer, and some of you may have heard me say this before. So, before you start blasting my idea (or praising it?), know that I dislike the DMCA as much as the next guy and that I am interested in feedback about the legal issues here.
As I understand it, the DMCA makes it illegal to even try to circumvent any security system on a digital device. I define digital security systems (and I don't think I am alone) as any hardware or software that keeps private information inside of a system and unwanted information and software (viruses, hackers, Trojan-horses and the like) outside of the system. In this case, my spam-blocking software can be considered a security measure. So then, any spammer that adds random characters, hides words in images or any other techniques to get through my blocking software is then intentionally circumventing my security software. If this is all true, then can't we persecute spammers on the bases of the DMCA. I think that this may lead to two benefits. First, we may be able to slow or stop spam in the US. Secondly, those that put the DMCA there in the first place (namely big businesses) would have a reason to fight the DMCA. So, where is the flaw in my logic here?
No man is an island... But I wouldn't mind having a bigger moat.
The 200-odd spam kingpins are malignant bastards. They are not idiots.
> And why do companies keep using spam for advertising?
The customers of Eddy Marin and the 200-odd spam kingpins are both malignant bastards and idiots.
If you hire Eddy Marin to spam for you, Eddy Marin makes money whether you make money or not. If you're an idiot and a malignant bastard, you'll hire an Ethikul E-Bidniz Murketeer to "help you get the message out to a 100% confirmed opt-in list of targets, the EEBM will gladly take your money and ruin your reputation (Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Martha Stewart Online).
So yeah, that's why, even despite a near-zero response rate and the visceral hatred his marketing campaigns bring towards his customers, Eddy Marin gets up in the morning and goes to work.
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..
Bowie J. Poag
It does NOT mean that the judge rejected the basis for EMarketersAmerica's case, and it definately does not (as Steve Linford from Spamhaus claims) set a precedent in their favour. If some other (better funded) spammer decided to sue them tomorrow for the same causes of action, the dismissal of this lawsuit would have zero effect on that case.
Here's a copy of the original lawsuit which was filed by the world's most incompetant lawer, Mark Felstein who was hired by a bunch of Boca Raton chickenboner spammer scumbags, under the auspices of this "emarketersamerica" front. A summary of the charges is here. You can also read the defendant's item-by-item reply to the original complaint. It's quite funny, actually, and reminds me of IBM's response to SCO's bullshit where they basically state that every allegation is false to fact, other than the obvious, such as "IBM sells computers".
Except in this case, the spammer plaintifs were so incompetant that they couldn't even formulate a single complaint that had any basis in law. They also tried to file a temporary restraining order against spamhaus, which the Florida judge basically laughed at. The suit was really just a big case of harassment, and a ploy to somehow reveal the identity of the anonymous party[1] behind SPEWS -- which is not Steve Linford or Spamhaus, as a lot of these slashdot stories seem to imply. Spamhaus was just one of about 13 various mirrors that distributed the SPEWS DNS blocklist.
You can find more details here.
[1]<cough>Terry H. Gilsenan aka "Posopis Menaga" (pidgin for "postmaster")
So why do they keep coming to work? Are they idiots? Or just malignant bastards?
Neither - they are con men.
why do companies keep using spam for advertising?
Take a look at some of the other replies to post, and you'll see why.. people see lots of spam, so they erroneously conclude that it works (after all, why would there be so much spam if it didn't work, they ask.)
It's all because spammers are con artists. They convince the stupid people (companies) that they can make money.. the net result is that the spammers get money, the stupid people get hosed, and everybody else gets spam.
The spammers then find another victim, and it all starts over again.
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.
Only in America can businesses violate privacy, conduct "business" with little or no regard for the consumer, and still be considered legit by a select few.
Yes! In most places around the world, that's the government's job!
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad