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."

Comments

Privacy violation?

[ogmiostech]

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

Re:Wrong.

[Eggplant62]

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.

Being that these gents did business in the US by sending their spam to Yahoo addresses, they're fully culpable under US law. Same goes for any Canadian corporation doing business with the US: Fuck up and you'll be sued under the laws of the country where you fucked up.

In fact, IIRC, the CAN-SPAM act specifically prohibits individuals / companies from taking legal action against alleged spammers.

Seeing as how Yahoo is an internet service provider by the definition of the CANSPAM act, they're well within their rights to bring suit against the Heads.

It's just too bad that there's not another brother named Richard to lend a comedic air to it all.

WTF (reality check needed)

[Imperator]

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:

1. Where the fuck did you get that number?
2. What innumerate moderator thought your post was informative?
3. Are you karma whoring? (Seriously, I'm curious.)