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First Four People Charged Under CAN-SPAM Act
friedo writes "Four people in Detroit have been charged with emailing fraudulent sales pitches under the new federal CAN-SPAM Law. 'They were accused of disguising their identities in hundreds of thousands of sales pitches and delivering e-mails by bouncing messages through unprotected relay computers on the Internet.'"
Sadly, I doubt this will make any difference - they'll just forge more headers.
That won't even dent the problem. At least they're proving that their serious though, but unfortunately, I don't believe in every little helps in the case.
Aw, who am I kidding. Prosecuting people has never been a deterent to the crime.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Now we just need four convicted.
Who will be the first to blame the owners of said unprotected relays for our spam woes, as opposed to the spammers themselves?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I don't think this will affect the situation in the short run. I do think that it is a step in the right direction. Perhaps new laws wont be too far off when its noticed that overall CAN-SPAM doesnt have a significant effect on the amount of SPAM; although it will have an effect on where its sent from.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
Only four pieces of canned spammers?
Looking in my today's inbox, that's no big difference...
There you are, staring at me again.
What is this going to do to stem the tide of the other 3800 spams I have received in the last 18 hours?
CAN-SPAM is simply an enabling law.
Seriously, save jail for violent offenders. There's not enough room as it is. Spammers may be annoying, but they won't mug you on the street and rape your kids.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
like any attorney, he's on his own side. All he cares about is maybe making a little cash, but more importantly, getting his name in the papers. He couldn't care less about what happens to his client...I don't either, but that's beside the point.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
I just hope the penalty is severe enough to make CAN Spam economically unviable. Either way, I doubt it will stem the flow of Spam from China and Africa.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
If they're going to go after someone in the Detroit area why not Alan Ralsky?
Seriously, save jail for violent offenders. There's not enough room as it is. Spammers may be annoying, but they won't mug you on the street and rape your kids.
Umm, just because it's a white collar crime doesn't mean they shouldn't see a jail cell. With all that spamming, surely they can pay for their own jail cell. And while they won't rape your kids, they'll show them enough naked old men, kiddie porn, and animal lovin' to make them vomit. Not to mention how they outright hurt the economy. I would like to see them pick up the soap in prison a few times.let's say there is one murder per 50,000 in the population. let's say that the murder of this person affects 5 people (including the deceased) so badly that the rest of their life is ruined.
on average, this will happen to each involved at the midpoint of their lives (let's say).
So, in total, murderers remove roughly 1/5000 of life from each individual in society.
Do *you* spend more than 1/5000 of your life (roughly 20 seconds per day) dealing with spam? I do.
So, based on that (admittedly very rough) metric, who is worse?
Legally, this will never work. Why?
E.g. buy V1c0din from "HornyToad@hotmail.com" and get a 2000$ fine.
But you are not buying from "HornyToad@hotmail.com"; you are buying from Joe Schmoe via www.cheapdrugs.com. With spam, you never reply back to buy the stuff; you use an alternate method that's given to you in the spam email (such as a website). Unless the product you're buying is itself illegal, you can never be successfully prosecuted for buying it. Proving that you bought it because of a spam you received is impossible, and beside the point anyway.
Even though spam is the only method used to advertise the site, that's irrelevant. The site is there, and is offering a legal product. Anyone is free to visit it and buy whatever they want from it. The spam is the real problem, and can only be tackled directly.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
in the prisoner hierarchy. While I don't know first hand, I've heard that depending on your crime, you basically have a rank in the big house. Murders are high while pedophiles are low. While the spammers crime is no where near as bad as the two afore mentioned criminals, everyone except other spammers and this guy hate spammers. So where would a spammer fall on the prison's hierarchy?
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
I must protest your downplaying of the ever popular "slap on the wrist". Not only does being slapped on the wrist hurt really hard, but the social awkwardness of being accused of having been given only a slap on the wrist far outweighs any alternative methods that may be more violent. Having been slapped on the wrist myself on numerous occasions, I can tell you that one never really recovers from being slapped on the wrist, and the shame of the slapping on the wrist often drives the bearer of the slapping to cover it up with a watch or tatoo.
Do not mock the slap on the wrist unless you too have been slapped.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
"and the poor in jail..."
I never bought that fact. They're poor because they buy 100s of dollars of drugs.
I mean I'm "poor" but I also own a fast PC, lots of textbooks, a gameboy, two flashcarts, etc, etc, etc..
Excuse me while I shed a tear for the poor and impoverished that spend every time they get on booze so they can sleep in parking lots while I walk to/from school.
Excuse me while I shed a tear for the school dropouts who mocked me in earlier grades and now beg me for money so they can keep up their habits.
Excuse me while I shed a tear for the hungry, refused food from shelters who's sole requirement is that you are sober.
Excuse me while I shed a tear for the tired, refused beds for not being sober.
Excuse me.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Investigators said they consulted Dr. Michael D. Jensen, a medical professor at the Mayo Medical School, who confirmed that ingredients in the weight-loss product sold in the disputed e-mails wouldn't work.
Remarks about spamming itself aside... one has to question the means they are using to charge these guys. How ambigious is this law if the only evidence they needed was, not that they were spamming, but whether the product they were spamming was legitamite.
This proves that politicans don't really care about technology. If this idea were applied to drug law, dealers would get arrested for selling sitty coke instead of getting hit for just selling coke.
but then of course, all these guys are on crack anyways...
-B
The murderer! What, are you going to euthanize the stupid because they waste your time?
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
they pollute?
have the judge sentence them to a cleanup job for a few years. preferably something really stinky and disgusting.
slave labor, i know. but it should teach them a lesson, more so than being someone's b!tch in a federal PMITA prison.
Sounds OK to me.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The murder is an immoral act with no possible way of recovery. Spam is an annoyance. Not even close to a fair comparison.
This is a very difficult problem. As long as the web is so open and allows anyone to e-mail, this will keept happening. What we need is someone to build a new e-mail system, only run by certified players. That is secure, and all the e-mail is fully encrypted on the servers. Now should this not be a national concern? We already have the law makers on our side. So, techno geeks, have the patience to phone or actually! mail! That way we can no longer keept getting ignored. I bet you if all of us here at slashdot wrote to out government, we would make the news!! Come on people !! Lead the charge!! All we need is to get noticed, and to make bush and kerry realize they need to talk about these issues in public! Just because we don't watch TV doesn't mean we should get punished!
This is crap. In the end, for the end user, what does spam really ammount to? I have to click delete several dozen times. Cry me a river. How in the hell is this anywhere near as bad as murder or any other violent crime? Let's keep spam in perspective. At worst, it's an economic crime. Make sure the punishment fits the crime.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
There is a case to be made that the CAN SPAM act is unnecessary, and that other laws cover spammers actions.
You could say that about a lot of feel good legislation that comes out of Washington and your state capital. Take my states ban on cell phones while driving -- we already had about a dozen laws on the books about distracted driving and people who had actually been cited under those laws for using their cell phone. But let's go one step further and add yet another law to the books (in an election year no less) because it was a popular issue and we need votes.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Read all the facts for yourself here.
I agree that anyone who uses drugs instead of providing for their families or themselves shouldn't get much simpathy. But at the same time, they aren't doing anything that the rest of America isn't doing. And, being poor, they statistically have a far higher rate of mental and emotional problems than their well-to-do counterparts. Ever hear of coping?
But I think the real tragedy is that the poor get treated differently by our system of law. That is the real injustice. The fact that poor/minorities are incarcerated at a higher rate than their well-to-do counterparts and use the same amount of drugs indicates an inequality in enforcement/prosecution of drug criminals. What happened to justice being blind?
Taft
Why does free speech ALWAYS get brought into this. Spam has NOTHING to do with free speech. The Internet is not free. I pay for MY connection. I pay for my servers. People PAY me to use them. You see this is how I eat!!!! Every site or service you use is paid for my someone. They may allow you "to use" the site for free but it is not free. The person that owns the site can cut it off at anytime. If the person that has the site doesn't pay his ISP then they cut it off. Spammers pay me nothing. They do nothing but cost me money
Free speech is being able to express yourself in public, which I am totally for. If these Spammers want to stand on the side of the road and hawk their wares then fine, but when it comes into this box without expressed permission from me then this is theft of services.
Come on people learn this the Internet is built out of PRIVATE networks that ALLOW public access. Not free networks owned my the public.
Personally I feel jail is wrong in this case. I will be happy to skin them alive with a dull knife would be better. I'll be happy to do the carving for FREE!!!!
Or at least have some kind of organization that manages mails/adresses and makes people pay to send a mail to their domain. Then use the money to keep this domain clean.
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
The CNN article is light on details, but I suspect these stories are related.
My wife is a bakruptcy attorney (in the Detroit area), which means she deals with the federal bar and federal courts, instead of local district courts. Anyway, one of her counterparts across town had an Exchange server zombied. Somehow I think having a pissed-off federal lawyer probably caused more action than the "10,000 complaints" from regular joes cited in the article.
I guess the morale is: If you're going to commit cybercrime, don't do it against a lawyer.
{ - Generic Guy - }
Better to throw them in "court" based on a few million pieces of prima-facie evidence called "their spam."
Let's stop trying to make excuses; the government has utterly failed in its duty to prosecute blatant, obvious cases of egregious fraud (and many other kinds of criminal activity; pump & dump, illegal drugs, younameit) - that were broadcast to millions of Americans and reached more people than many TV shows.
And if they proceed in prosecuting people at this puny rate, I would say they are continuing to fail.
Yeah, sure, if we lock up all the domestic spammers, we'll still get spam from Africa and China, but let's actually get to that point first, and deal with it then.
I don't know about anyone else, but for many orgs I know spam is reaching a kind of crisis point, where anyone who has to publish their address is, within a matter of months, getting hundreds of spam for every few legitimate messages. It is rendering email useless.
A minor economic setback, I guess? Too trivial for the feds to bestir themselves?
CAN SPAM is a sad joke, but the punch line is that someone may have actually waited for it to go after these guys...
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
At first glance the knee-jerk reaction is to cheer the Good Guys and jeer the Bad Guys and feel that everything is working correctly. After a few moments reading the predictable posts on /. I have to wonder about a few things.
My first thought is,"What competent net-admin leaves their mail proxies wide open?" Then I happened across a post from a fellow who claimed that he was one of the victims of the spammers. The post indicated that the spammers had targeted spam-filters and anti-virus software running on his system to relay their material. Has he reported the vulnerabilities in this software? Is there a legitimate case for fraud against anti-virus and anti-spam software producers if their products open up just as many vulnerabilities as they fix? I'm not suggesting that we start feeding the lawyers like we feed trolls but perhaps, rather than laying off thousands of workers, upper management should start taking a more critical approach to the FUD they believe and the software that they buy to soothe their conscience while they're on the golf course.
Next I have to wonder about the 10,000 complaints received by the FTC. I find it hard to believe that most of the complaints were sent by private citizens. I don't know anyone that makes a practice out of e-mailing the FTC every time they receive an unwanted piece of mail. They're either hooked by the scam or they delete the spam. Some of the less educated will click the "remove me" link but I think most of us have learned better than to do that. The same fellow that claimed that he was part of one of the helplessly victimized corporations claimed that he had been sending some of the complaints to the FTC. If he was competent enough to track the spam and send complaints why could he have not simply closed the security holes in his system? Maybe there's no law defining it but this situation seems awfully similar to entrapment--the kind that catches a 12-year old that thinks they're getting away with the cookie jar.
Finally I have to wonder about the FTC and the types of spam you receive. I have a number of e-mail addresses and only one of them receives any spam on a regular basis. It's on hotmail and I've used it for more than seven years. That e-mail address saw my foolish college years and made its way to every mailing list possible when drinking commenced the Friday after final exams or in the extreme boredom of poverty embellished vacation time. Even after making it through those years, my hotmail address receives no kiddie porn, no animal porn, only select adult porn, and mostly just advertisements for home mortgages, debt reduction, escorts, or herbal medicines for weight loss or physical enhancement. So the question is: What mailing lists have people been getting involved in where they're plagued by all of the ultra-filthy, ultra-evil spam? Could the FTC use spam complaints as a method of profiling the alleged spam victim? It would be easy enough to correlate the type of spam that you receive with the places that you frequent on the 'net. Getting people hooked on finching on their neighbor may help them land themselves under surveillance or in hot water. While this is a Good Thing if we feel morally righteous enough to police each citizen as a potential criminal it doesn't help society as a whole to become a paranoid, frightened, distrustful police state. Well, maybe it helps some people. It helps to own the jail contract, the surveillance contract, or be the head of the Clerk of Court office.
While I'm glad to see that something is being done about spam it seems to me that the real solution to the problem lies not in catching the spam senders but rather in reforming the systems which aid them such as fraudulent or excessively marketed "catch-all" security programs, default holes in MS operating systems, less than qualified network administrators that leave their mail proxy open, and opportunistic federal agents that don't act until people band together to bait some dumb sucker and drop him in the lap of the prosecutor.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Here are 20 of the 194 spams I've gotten on ONE ACCOUNT since I last cleaned that mailbox 4 DAYS ago:
... ... ... ...
Ivan Carmichael; Visit our Internet pharmacy, b...
Tammi Vincent; ""get pro.tection incase of =?...
Wyatt Staton; bellyfull contribution father
Wyatt Staton; bellyfull contribution father
Wyatt Staton; bellyfull contribution father
Wyatt Staton; bellyfull contribution father
Sharon Darnell; Check it out
Sharon Darnell; Check it out
Sharon Darnell; Check it out
Sharon Darnell; Check it out
Tropes H. Listed; Design, best meds
Peggy Velazquez; albanian presumptuous dalhousi...
Stefanie Bowden; alex curry mitt nullstellensat...
Stefanie Bowden; alex curry mitt nullstellensat...
Peggy Velazquez; albanian presumptuous dalhousi...
Stefanie Bowden; alex curry mitt nullstellensat...
Peggy Velazquez; albanian presumptuous dalhousi...
Stefanie Bowden; alex curry mitt nullstellensat...
Peggy Velazquez; albanian presumptuous dalhousi...
Wilma Franks; Visit our Internet pharmacy, b...
See anything in there from Dell? GE? MS? No. I registered my Pavilion with HP when I bought it and I get, like, 1 message from them every 3 months. Myabe one message every 2 months from my ISP and my cell phone provider. Legitimate businesses are NOT the problem.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Well, if the person send out bulk e-mail, under 3 different subject name, therefore broken 3 laws, and strike out?
I think it should be.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- If picture worth a thousand words, how many megapixels is it? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dividing crisis and damage to a life across the population? That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a whlie on slashdot.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship