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Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits
ackthpt writes "Wired is carrying news that Microsoft, America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo are filing suits against spammers under the CANSPAM act. They will 'follow the money' to find the perpetrators and shut them down. Suits currently filed against John Does will have actual names attached once subpoenas get the names of the actual persons. I wish them all the luck, as I clean about 500 pieces of drek a day from my mailboxes." Other readers point to coverage from the BBC and from the Associated Press (here's the AP story as carried by the Boston Globe).
I wonder what effect this will have on the number of spam messages we get daily?
Six spammers is probably a drop in the desert, and shutting them down won't cause a noticable impact, but at least it's a start.
Well, I hope that they get the actual spammers rather than joe-clueless who's machine was hijacked to spread the spam. Hard to show any intent there, but intent seems to be a victim of the spotlight-seekers much too often.
No, I have no sympathy for joe-clueless, but they do not deserve what spammers deserve.
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Used to be spam tried to tell me something. Now it's so clogged with filter-defeaters that they can't manage to squeeze in a message.
Hope they recover at least their sysadmin's time.
Good start, but it doesn't go far enough. Part of the law for Can-Spam they're being prosecuted under is the absence of addresses to get off a mailing list - but who is seriously going to click on a link if they are there? How do we trust them?
This won't stop until spammers start getting locked up for years and people stop buying off them.
For so long, spam was just "part of the internet." It seems now the tide is turning, where it's gotten so bad that major companies are taking drastic measure to beat it down. Now that the momentum has started, it's only a matter of time before spam is almost completely defeated, though I'm sure we'll always be seeing the occasional "ENLARGE YOUR PENIS!!1" and "KICKFUCKING FLEA BITTEN SLUTS EATING NASTY THINGS OFF THE FLOOR!!1" until the end of time.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I expect my inbox to be filled with just as much spam and all the lawyers will be slightly richer.
It's not so much fighting evil, ask seeking to gain a monopoly on it :)
Hitler fought Stalin. Nothing new under the sun.
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Why should they accept incomming mail from dynamic IP's? There is no realy good reason to, people sending legitimate mail generaly use a smarthost at there ISP to forward mail though, spambots do not. By funneling mail though a smarthost the ISP can easily setup rules to keep people from getting accounts and sending millions of emails.
Yea this is probably flame bait for slashdot it happens.
No sir I dont like it.
Umm, they are pretty much underground now aren't they? Considering the spammers are almost exclusively using the trojaned PC network to relay their crap I would say it is as underground as you can get.
This "follow the money" routine will work, the spammers need to get paid at some point, and considering most of their income is based on amount of sales from the spam then you just need to have a nice chat with whomever is accepting the loot and sending the products.
They are #1 on the SBL! 155+ spam gangs are on UUnet. We need to sue UUnet to get all the spammer money that they have received from he spammers that they host. I keep sending mail to as many email addresses of thiers that i can find. Damn spam supporters.
137 of which are non-spam
You get 137 legitimate emails a day? How does that leave you with time to do anything other than read your email?
Reminds me of my brief stint at IBM, circa 1996-1997: I could have spent literally an entire shift doing nothing but reading the utterly inane, purposeless nonsense that the higher-ups foisted on us every day.
To this day, I contend that, for the vast majority of businesses, email [and instant messaging, and pagers, and beepers, and walkie-talkie/blackberry/802.11xyz thingamabobs] cause a net decrease in productivity.
Well, they were clever enough to get past my Thunderbird installation's bayesian filter, even after thousands of messages marked as spam.
It's interesting that we're having another of a technology-beats-technology war here. The success one drives the improvement of the other, and vice versa.
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On the contrary, I'd argue that spammers tend to be quite smart using intelligently designed tools. Aside from the volume of spam most of us receive daily, it's still not the easiest to filter at times, not because the spammers are dumb, but because they are smart enough to try to keep up with advanced in spam detection so as to be able to bypass them more easily.
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when these spammers face criminal charges.... anything less won't make much of a difference. Most of these spammers don't have any money and have probably declared bankruptcy in the past so it'll be no big deal to do so again IF they're even identified, much less lose in court.
What we need is Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison time for spammers. AOL, Microsoft and others should lobby the government to start prosecuting these spammers. You can follow any one of them and find that they've exploited and broken into other computer systems.
These spammers hack AOL accounts, send out viruses and worms, misrepresent themselves, engage in credit card fraud, break into third-party servers and promote fraudulent activity. We have laws against these sorts of things... criminal laws. Why is it that the only action that seems to be taken is civil?
When was the last time the ISPs hiked up the rates explicitly because of the E-mail traffic they had to filter and handle? Call me old-fashioned, but I'd settle for the lower volume of spam that will result from this action The time I would save is worth more than a 50 coupon.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I have to assume that they would include and subpoena the records of the businesses the spammers are promoting.. that's a key method to help identify them. If the companies aren't the employers of the spammers themselves already.
I just hope the criminal authorities also follow the civil case and then nail these people with criminal charges.
You aren't paying the postage for those CDs unlike spam. Junk mail is paid for by whoever is sending it.
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There is a HUGE potential market out there for "good" bulk advertising out there, if only all the pr0n and scams can be eliminated. These large ISPs have an "existing business relationship" with all their customers, and maybe arguably with those that send email through their servers. Just think of how much these ISPs could make by sending "good" spam from Ford, Pepsi, Pfizer, or PlayBoy.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
God, this joke is getting old.
Look, people: there are no angels in this business, and everybody knows it. Microsoft is evil, spammers are evil, AOL and Yahoo! are only slightly less evil than the first two; also on the "evil" list are Apple, Sun, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Adobe, and, well, pretty much any company with yearly revenue in excess of $1 million. Every single one of them would dominate the entire business world, crush the competition, and eliminate all innovation that didn't translate directly into greater short-term profits if they could.
What most of us down here at the bottom of the food chain understand is that it doesn't matter. We support companies -- whether "support" means buying their products or just cheering them on -- not on the basis of their moral purity (because there isn't any) but on the basis of what's most useful to us. If Microsoft spends some portion of its ill-gotten gains on cutting down on the amount of spam I get, that is useful to me, even if everything else they do is not only useless but actively harmful. There's no cognitive dissonance involved.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's the Microsoft lobbyists and salesmen that you have to worry about. Quit thinking of Microsoft as litigious assholes. It's not that I worry about people having ill-will toward MS, but if you think of them as litigious, you're just falling for a feint. That's when you get stabbed in the heart by their real weaponry.
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.. that MS is going to use the same methods to find the spammers that the RIAA uses to find those that share MP3s, subpoenas against the ISPs. I know some ISPs fought the RIAA (Verizon comes to mind). Wonder if they will fight MS?
I buy that, but only so far. The feds went nuts busting people selling bongs via mail order, including putting Tommy Chong in jail. Whether you agree or disagree with pot smoking, I think you would agree that "Operation Headhunter" (the official name for the bong busts) was the most ridiculous waste of enforcement dollars, especially compared with the wholesale fraud and destruction to computer systems that goes on in the world of spam.
Prosecutors go after politically expedient and easy targets. I don't doubt that a RICO investigation of even a single spammer would be a huge undertaking -- subpeonas, records, undercover investigations, and it's probably some pretty tricky *law* to practice as well.
It's not as flashy and politically agreeable as throwing a bunch of angry muslims in the clink on trumped up charges.
I don't think this will hold up - it seems to me that this is a revisiting of the FTC's Do-Not-Call list; even though the appeal was upheld, it's still being slugged out in court. I see this as a similar issue, is commercial speech protected by the first amendment? I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but God knows we don't want to give the current administration more ammo to start monitoring, restricting, and censoring online speech; or have we all forgotten that Patriot Act II may still be around the corner...