Slashdot Mirror
The Family That Spams Together Stays Together
Anonymous Coward writes "The Globe & Mail has a story about an Ontario, Canada man who is being sued, along with his father and brother, by Yahoo under the CAN-SPAM Act. The Yahoo suit claims that Eric Head, along with his father and brother, were sending out millions of spam emails per month, as well as compiling lists of email addresses to sell to other spammers. Eric's company, Gold Disk Canada Inc., gathered lists of email addresses and sold them for $29.99 for 100,000 email addresses on up to $1,599.99 for 10 million addresses."
...I mean, we are talking Canadian dollars aren't we? :p
Spam doesnt fall far from the spam tree.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/12/172622 1&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126
Christ, its from yesterday even.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Please let one of them be called 'Richard'...
CAN-SPAM is not going to make a difference in the light that 40% of global e-mail is spam.. and a lot of it comes off American shores..
Every little helps i guess..
Simon.
Ontario is in Canada. CAN-SPAM is a US act. This is Yahoo suing a spammer, the CAN-SPAM act is completely and utterly irrelevant.
In fact, IIRC, the CAN-SPAM act specifically prohibits individuals / companies from taking legal action against alleged spammers.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Is yahoo will lose this one. Us law does not have any meaning in canada.
Spam is not an extraditable offense, thus no canadian law has been broken and yahoo will lose.
Sorry guys
because this is one set of genes I'm sure we all don't want in our genepool..
"ewww.. Spammer DNA... Gross!"
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Oops! Look at that! I dropped a CD with 5,000 e-mail addresses! (Flash required)
wow... i never realized how cheap the addresses were. i had always hoped my address would be like worth $1. I guess I should have hoped for a penny for my address. I feel so used.
should go extinct together.
Just a thought...
of their DNA samples may prove insightful?
10 million addresses for 1500 bucks... why not just sell harvesting tools and avoid prosecution? I can't imagine a world where I'd see a CD with 10 million e-mails on it and think, "wow, what a great buy!" and not think "wow, 10 million illegal violations of privacy!" They should make unauthorized email address distribution fineable at $1000 per offense.
stuff |
Is this the same Gold Disk from the halcyon days of the Amiga, with their magnificent PageSetter program?
How the mighty have fallen.
The spammers are in Ontario you say? The spammers are SELLING personally identifiable information (e-mail addresses) you say? I'm not an expert...oh wait, I am...without the consent of the address owners, this guy is in clear violation of PIPEDA (the new, federal privacy act). Patrick
I enjoyed his spam. I would look forward to it like a letter from an ex-girlfriend that I haven't spoken to in a while.
Maybe he'll write me from prison. ^_^
The best thing to do to stop the ridiculous tide of spam would surely be to force spammers to eat one can of SPAM per piece of spam sent.
Eventually, they'd all be either so scared of their SPAM punishment that no more spam was sent, or they'd be dead from SPAM poisoning. Either way, we acheive the desired effect.
I wonder if they posted a reply to the recent Ask Slashdot question about "A Family IT/Tech Business"?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how does a US law have jurisdiction over a Canadian company/individual doing "business" in Canada?
$1,599.99 * 600*10^27 = $960,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
NEARLY UNLIMITED EMAIL ADRESSES FOR FREE!
Here's a small sample of our list!
Order now! No satisfaction, NO REFUND!
Hate me!
If everyone who owned a website posted thousands of bogus email addresses, then spammers harvesting efforts would quickly become useless. It should not be too hard to litter the web with billions of false e-mail addresses on bot-finadable pages.
The more enterprising site and mail server owners could even create semi-real bot email addresses that simply forward all emails to authorities. Even better, the mail server might first appear to "look at" spam by using an automated process to appear to fetching the coded JPGs that tell the spammer they have a live address. After the spammer thinks they have a good address, all further email would be sent directly to authorities.
This could be a DDoP (Distributed Denial of Profits) attack on harvesters and spammer. By creating ten to a hundred times the number of bad addresses as good addresses, we could reduce profit per spam by a factor of ten to a hundred and create a massive stream of data samples for authorities to use to catch spammers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Eric was a friend-of-a-friend who, according to my friend, had his own "business". Having heard rumours that he was spamming, and having met the guy, I'm not the least bit surprised. He and his high school friends used to run a site called me6 (which seems to be defunct now) that had video of them doing jackass type stuff.
I do find it really neat to have met a spammer - I only regret that I didn't know it when I met him. I'm not violent, and don't condone that, but I would have loved to find some sort of ironic justice for him.
I'm kinda wondering whether my email addresses came in the cheapo $29.99 version, or if I qualified for the $1599.99 Deluxe package...
How about if we're just ashamed of the man who stole the Presidency? Would that be enough? After all, he's the one flouting our constitution and using this "War on Terror" to get himself re-elected.
Believe me, if I had the choice I wouldn't waste a single gov't dollar on hookers to torment those men. I'd have the hookers over HERE!
Time to get those catalog & magazine subscriptions filled out again. Has anybody figured out these guys snail mail address yet?
The people you have to fight are the big bosses. In the case of Spam, the IDIOTS who try to sell their products and services through spamming. If more action is taken to prosecute these [deleted expletives], we will be able to combat spam better.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
I say we go one further...not just the death penalty, but they die by being fed feet first into a wood chipper. That MAY server as a deterent.
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
Should have changed them a few weeks ago, when cable (the GBP/USD rate) was even higher.
I'd broadly agree with the sentiment that a Kerry victory, if it resulted in the reversal of the insane deficit spending & fiscal irresponsibilty by GWB, would be USD-positive. But in the shorter term, Japan is easing back in intervention to allow for end of FY profit booking by their firms. Look for a nice little trading opp or two there.
But before you book those leveraged ForEx trades for 12 months out, look at the headlines saying Nader might get 7% of the 2004 vote. You know what that means? Yup, "Four more years..."
Good grief, just when I thought I'd almost forgotten about the evil world of FX trading ...
-- now where did I put that
Wow, that's a lot.
That's equivalent to every single person on the planet receiving over 3 trillion spams per second.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Family IT/Tech Business guy : here you got an example of "unique problems you can encounter"
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
The Yahoo suit claims that Eric Head, along with his father and brother...
Please tell me that they're named Dick Head and Shit Head so I can know that I've been yelling the right names at my computer screen this whole time.
CAN-SPAM applies, and of course US law has extraterritorial effect.
As for our end of things, laws extend as far as the counstitution (due process) allows. On the foreign end, they may be *practical* problems such as getting physical custody (extradition), seizing assets, collecting evidence, but the US and Canada are on very good terms and have one of the most significant economic relationships in the world -- we can work it out. Also, if the defendants have violated the act and we can't reach them, they may still have reason to regret it -- and US assets might be forfeited and they might not want to visit. They can also be subject to suit in absentia -- if they refuse to show up on proper notice and jurdiction, they may lose their defenses.
Jurisdiction derives from the domestic effects, you can't just hide on the other side of the border. The classic example is that if you shoot someone across the border, you are subject to the jurisdiction; yes this applies to fraud and other intangible offenses like the Nigerian scams. Again, the problems are practical. About CAN-SPAM. The practical problems in enforcing it are HUGE, but clearly the theoretical jurisdiction exists. Also -- it seems a bit implausible to suppose that Yahoo's lawyers missed so many first-year law classes that they didn't catch any of this.
As for who may sue -- the law in enforceable by the FTC, civil action by the states, and not individuals but ISP's (here, Yahoo):
(f) ACTION BY PROVIDER OF INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE.--
(1) ACTION AUTHORIZED.--A provider of Internet access service adversely affected by a violation of section 5 may bring a civil action in any district court of the United States with jurisdiction over the defendant, or in any other court of competent jurisdiction, to--
(A) enjoin further violation by the defendant; or
(B) recover damages in an amount equal to the greater of--
(i) actual monetary loss incurred by the provider of Internet access service as a result of such violation; or
(ii) the amount determined under paragraph (2).
(2) STATUTORY DAMAGES.--
(A) IN GENERAL.--For purposes of paragraph (1)(B)(ii), the amount determined under this paragraph is the amount calculated by multiplying the number of willful, knowing, or negligent violations by an amount, in the discretion of the court, of up to $10 (with each separately addressed unlawful message carried over the facilities of the provider of Internet access service or sent to an electronic mail address obtained from the provider of Internet access service in violation of section 5(b) treated as a separate violation). In determining the per-violation penalty under this subparagraph, the court shall take into account the degree of culpability, any history of prior such conduct, ability to pay, the extent of economic gain resulting from the violation, and such other matters as justice may require.
(B) LIMITATION.--For any violation of section 5 (other than section 5(a)(1)), the amount determined under subparagraph (A) may not exceed $500,000, except that if the court finds that the defendant committed the violation willfully and knowingly, the court may increase the limitation established by this paragraph from $500,000 to an amount not to exceed $1,500,000.
(3) ATTORNEY FEES.--In any action brought pursuant to paragraph (1), the court may, in its discretion, require an undertaking for the payment of the costs of such action, and assess reasonable costs, including reasonable attorneys' fees, against any party.
So you're telling me there are 6*10^29 spam messages sent out every year? The average year has 365.2425 days IIRC, which assuming no leap seconds means 31556952 seconds in a year. That works out to approximately 1.9*10^22 spam messages per second. The IPv4 address space has (far) fewer than 4294967296 available addresses. That means that each second, the average Internet-connected computer is sending out more than 4426865629872 spam messages. That's 4.4 trillion spam messages per second from every node on the network, including the billions that don't even exist.
Which leaves me three questions:
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Did you know people do this sort of thing voluntarily? (Note the "spam cram" -- Hormel asked them to change the name to "The World Championship SPAM(R) Burger Eating Contest.") What if spam-lovers self-selected to be spammers? It's spamful.
What's remarkable to me, given the examples of companies like Microsoft, Apple, Disney, etc., on trademark, is Hormel's fairly good humor about all these uses of its name such as this, UCE, Monty Python. Granted the slang use of spam would've gotten away from them no matter what (they once sued the "spam king"), but they chose to make wine out of water and take the benefit of people hearing the name -- provided no one publishes what they actually put in their product.
Now wouldn't you like to go have some nice Spam(R)?
So if persons are exploiting my email address for profit should I get some kind of compensation?
I say the family should be forced to eat a can of spam for each piece of spam mail they sent.
Spammers profit no matter how much mail they have to send, and no matter how many of those email addresses are bad. The bandwidth costs to send out hundreds of millions of emails is basically nil, compared to what they make back on sales to those poor people dumb enough to actually buy the products they're advertising.
Not true. While, spammers do make money at very low rates of return, reducing the rate of return would hurt them. If spammers get 1/10 or 1/100 the number of clickthroughs, they will feel that.
Even if spammers use zombies to send mail, that resource is finite. If spammers find they need one hundred times as many zombies to get the same number if idiots to buy their junk, it will impact them.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Just wondering what a major spam offense gets you in punishment once proven guilty...
Perhaps making them dig anything and everything they need out of a pile of useless shit for the rest of their lives is fair... you know 50 tv remotes but only one of them has batteries.. stuff like that all over their houses.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
If only we could stuff spammers with that 6' SPAM display. (Either end would do.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
provided no one publishes what they actually put in their product.
Pork shoulder, ham, salt, water, sugar and sodium nitrate.
Though no one's really sure that's all they put in it. As one of thousands of haikus on Spamhaiku goes:
A worker threatened
to tell what's in SPAM; now he
sleeps with the fishes.
...
I imagine the suckers giving someone money to spam on their behalf are where all the money for spam comes from--and if it doesn't work, who cares? There's one born every minute, and some of them have dreams of getting rich quick by a spam-vertized small business.
Spammer to dumb business owner: "the steady stream of hate mail lets you know it's working! You're getting 'mindshare', there's no such thing as bad publicity! Send out another 10 million and the customers will start rolling in!"
...I went to highschool with him! Damn this angers me, the guy was such a moron in school! Anyone looking to pull an Alan Rawlsky with this family? I am willing to help!
hope they'll stay in the same jail room once convicted
I believe they use sodium nitrite now. And they don't mention shoulders, just pork and ham, salt, water, sugar, sodium nitrite.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
You know what else they say... and in my spams, it sure ain't "the family that spams together, stays together".
Unless the glue that keeps the family together in a spammer's twisted mind is composed gallons of ho+ donk3y s3m3n for s|s+er, a few g1an+ h0r5e c0ck for d4d, and sometimes the occasional e1ephan+ or badg3r for m0m (Or a snake! A snake! But never a mushroom, at least not yet... any spammers out there need a new niche? Whole untapped market out there for mushroom 1nc3st pr0n, guaranteed to make ya millyuns), but whatever part of the barnyard is involved, the family's together, man.
Spammer Family Values. Gotta love 'em man. (Well, for values of "love" approaching "retch".)
I've been feeding spambots bad addresses for months and months now. They keep coming back for more and more. I've probably fed them millions of addresses. I'm hoping that those CDs contain mostly the garbage addresses I (and hopefully thousands of others) am/are feeding them. I do this via websites, at URLs that bots should leave alone (via the robots.txt file), via links that people can't see. I figure disobedient robots should be rewarded with infinite garbage. I'm using a souped-up version of Infinospam.pl, which belches forth megabytes of fictitious email addresses, Shovel.pl, which generates tons of garbage mixed with half complete mailto: urls, and SpamThis.pl, which takes the originating IP address of the request, and looks it up in the whois databases, and feeds back a series of disguised emails that are their own. I also see that there is another called wpoison available, that looks pretty good, and uses a pretty large dictionary. Like infinospam, it will generate a mix of mailto:, regular text, and links pointing to itself (in disguise), and is a cgi perl script. If enough people do this, the CD's that are for sale to spammers will be largely worthless.
http://www.canada411.com/english/presults.asp?last name=head&firstname=&citytown=Kitchener&province=O N&row=0
We're gonna get Ontario on the map one way or another. If it's not the biggest pot bust ever, then this SPAM thing should do it.
Adventure City Tours
If everyone who owned a website posted thousands of bogus email addresses, then spammers harvesting efforts would quickly become useless. It should not be too hard to litter the web with billions of false e-mail addresses on bot-finadable pages.
If you really want to hurt the spam industry, then synthesize harvestable addresses based on the domains of e-commerce sites that use spam. If the mail server at cheapviagra.biz starts getting thousands or millions of emails from other spammers, its going to impact the ecommerce sites that use spam.
Lets use spammers to spam other spammers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Strong bad gets $0.25 per e-mail!
Ugh, I think I broke my calvicus...majoras.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Everyone is so quick to jump on the wagon on this, but these guys aren't being sued for spam(right?). I'd be for that; that's what's truely wrong. If you go out and harvest email addresses and try to correlate them to physical addresses and people, that's what tons of businesses do: M$, yahoo, the US govt, NY times, etc. Companies sell this information for huge amounts. But everyone here is just all ready to jump over some mom and pop shop and totally forget about the real data mines being developed. It seems it's getting easier and easier for the powers at be to pass laws designed to keep anyone from entering into thier space.
.deb package it up.
In a way, I'd almost rather have it that the databases were something under the GPL. That would kill this whole industry and put the people back in control. Someone should start a project like this before that "Copywrite Databases" Law gets passed. Think: take all the information from phone books internationally, correlate with as much as possible, pump into postgresql,
Jeff
A ton of us are Canadian, let's go picket their homes and businesses (the security company they run), and visit all their neighbours and their security company's clients and hand out flyers.
Maybe first we should get a friend in law enforcement to check the gun registry first, just to make sure that they don't have a stack of guns inside their front porch. And a criminal background check too, to make sure they're not the type that's "quick to anger and resort to violence".
Shoot, I'd put in $100 to put a **big-ass** ad in the area paper with their pictures saying "SPAMMERS WHO LIVE IN KITCHENER" along with links to relevant documentation and excerpts. (I'd want to be sure that any such act was adequately *solid* - ala "the truth" is the best defence against defamation and the like...)
Isn't this why Americans have the right to bear arms? :)
Um, let's see ...
3 years ago I rented a hotel room in Nice, France for US$85 per night.
The same hotel room on my trip this year is US$250 per night.
What's that about the Canadian dollar?
Please remove me from your mailing list, I no longer wish to receive any of these messages.
Thank you,
me@localhost
"And Grandma, you generate the penis enlarger spam, Okay?"
Table-ized A.I.
There are loads of details at: http://antispam.yahoo.com/spamandthelaw
(look for Case Number 04 00965)
According to the copy of the suit filing by Yahoo (a PDF file at http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/pdf/complaint.pdf), the defendants are: Eric Head, Matthew Head and Barry Head, and "On information and belief, Defendants conduct their illegal operations from the physical address 27 Oliver Court and 31 Oliver Court, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada". The suit also claims these are the addresses listed in the business registration for the following companies: "golddisk.net, NetSales Industries, Gold Disk Canada, Inc., Infinite Technologies Worldwide, Inc and Head Programming, Inc." Yes, golddisk.net appears to have a web site, though it doesn't say much (basically a "coming soon").
Bussinesses are subject to the laws of where they do bussiness. This is why the EU can sanction Microsoft. They are a US company, but since they do bussiness in Europe, they are subject to European law.
more likely, that worker too is SPAM. ;-)
... whatever ethical benefits that does or does not provide, it relieves me of wondering whether that elusive line between my food and dog food really exists!
of pork, the dictionary says "The flesh of a pig or hog used as food."
that's pretty broad!! of course what do i care, i'm vegetarian
iirc, sodium nitrite (NaNO2) is the meat preservative (and suspected carcinogen?); sodium nitrate (NaNO3) is the sodium version of saltpeter used as fertilizer and in gunpowder. i remember my disappointment as a kid that bacon could not be made into an explosive.
Err, guys, there really ARE tools that do such things as he's mentioning?
...
What? Don't you guys feed the spambots with crap?
Okay, you may now return to musing about whether any of the people in the Head family here are named 'Dick'
I guess I'm more lenient. I would only place them in a cell together. Give them family time to think it over.
Oh, and not feed them until there is only one person left alive
muahahahaha
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
These guys sold email addresses. Whom did they sell them to? Do they have records? Can we find that out? Are they selling to spammers directly?
Has anyone set up a website supposedly selling what they do and see what sorts of companies respond?
Would these guys sue for copyright infringement if another company bought a CD of email addresses and sold them for a lesser price in mass quantity?
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
I say the courts should force all three of them to change their first names to "Dick"!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Still I suppose it would make it real cheap if we went there on holiday.
found here:
http://www.healthwatcher.net/Quackerywatch/
I hope they are not inconvenienced by the people they have contacted.
I work at a local ISP, and he apparently was violating our contracts and actually used gigs of our service for spam on a highspeed package...
I tell ya... it's a small world!
... SOMEONE SHOULD MAKE A BLOODY EXAMPLE OF THEM!
Really, they earned some serious payback action, annoying the whole planet for years with that crap. DIEE SPAMMERS DIEEE!!!!
zero
[this is not intended to encourage anyone to really kill them, of course, just in case.. it's just this _FURIOUS_ RAGE . . . ]
I live in Kitchener-Waterloo, and it was Barry Head (the father) who came to my apartment last week to do a fire inspection and change the smoke detectors... If only I had known that he was a spammer... why couldn't this news have come out earlier!
I'm going to the casino. Don't gamble.
Complete post here.