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OptInRealBig Wins Restraining Order On SpamCop
arikb writes "Some online newspapers are reporting that the infamous Scott Richter and his company OptInRealBig won a temporary restraining order against SpamCop. The TRO prevents SpamCop from sending complaints about OIRB to their provider or removing email addresses from the complaints it receives which regard OIRB. I think we will rue this day for years to come."
Update: 05/12 16:43 GMT by T : The Ultimate Fartkno writes "HillsCap, a fed-up SpamCop user, is now organizing a class-action lawsuit to be brought against Richter and Opt-In. At least 1,000 signatures are needed, so tell your friends!"
These companies will continue to use whatever legal tactics they can so long as the response rate to their spam makes it profitable to run their business.
While I'm all for the further development of spam filters and blocking spammers, our inboxes will not be free of it till people stop BUYING from their advertisements.
A radioactive cat has 18 half-lives.
We are approaching this wrongly in so many ways.
There are legal methods which will fail because there is already precedence with SPAM grocery mailers, etc. There are also smart lawyers working (for high dollars) for the spammers who can get cluelesss judges to support the SPAM purveyors.
There are firewall/spam blocker methods that will continue to fail as spammers learn the tricks to route around them. This is the old hacker/security expert game. Build a better lock/block and it will soon be cracked/by-passed. The cycle is repeated ad nauseum.
The only real method of fixing this is to charge for e-mail. Once the spammers have to pay then their rate of return (ROI) will decrease so that it is no longer a viable business model.
Yes, this means we will pay for e-mail. I hate the idea as much as you, but I cannot see a working solution in any other method.
These arguments Richter is bringing up have had their showing in courts before. Richter complains that spam cop is interferring with his business. Spam Cop is doing no such thing. Spam Cop is not forced upon anyone. Spam Cop has given out their negative opinion about something and the target is just trying to shut them up.
Suppose I create a website which rates hardware for PCs and I decide that such in such Video Card really fucking blows big chunks. This is akin to the manufacter trying to argue that I am interfering with his business because I'm telling everyone his product sucks - as long as I'm not being intentionaly libelous, I would think I'd be 1st amendment protected.
Remeber that lawsuit last year from that copany that magiccaly sprung in Flordia just to flie a suit and disappear? That blew over - Spamhaus is still around and this will too.
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Just a thought; would this then require OIRB to positively identify which mass e-mail campaigns are theirs, so that SpamCop can comply with the injunction?
I mean in order to comply, OIRB would have to provide identifying characteristics of their e-mails, right? Isn't that just what all the spam filter guys have been looking for? Identifying characteristics... yeah I know, easy to change next week, but in the meantime they'll have a definitive list, giving them a clue into this week's state of the art in spam obfuscation...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I hate to say it, but I actually feel some sympathy for the spammer. I understand the Can Spam Act requires spammers to stop sending if recipients tell them to stop, but how am I to know that a given spammer is under U.S. jurisdiction; therefore, I will not tell the spammer to stop, lest I confirm that my email address is valid.
The problem is that any law that allows people to send spam legitimizes the activity.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
As long as he is fully following the federal can spam act rules he is on strong legal grounds.
To continue spamming, maybe. But how is he on strong legal grounds to force a company to stop classifying his email as "unwanted," when that is exactly what spamcop does. They take complaints, record them, munge them, and pass them on to service providers.
CAN-SPAM says "you can spam, if you do it this way, and you won't be sued or thrown in jail." But it doesn't say other people can't filter you, file complaints against you to your ISP, etc.
This is retarded.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Very true.. that would be descrimination based on colour. But where do you draw the line? Perhaps I want to use the female restroom at work. I can't? I'm being denied! Sexual descrimination!
Perhaps I want to counsel at an all girl's camp (I'm a guy). what I can't? Sexual descrimination!
My point is.. some things NEED to be descriminated against. Some don't.. and are wrong to descriminate against.
Or the judge who issued it?
It seems entirely reasonable to me, in the first instance, to rule in favour of the spammer.
Spammer: these guys are interfering with my business.
Spamcop: No, we're not.
Judge: Well, just lay off them a bit, while I think about it.
Yea, 9.8 megs of video data becomes your doom when it's linked off the second post on the first /. article after 9:00am EST.
/. effect, but this poor bastard could never have seen this coming.
Most times I don't care about the
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Great point. And if they put a "signifying" characteristic in their messages, many other spammers will want to duplicate it so they fall under the same protection. That is, they'll claim to be OIRB.
But OIRB would get pissed, and might sue. Both companies will go down in a boiling lake of legal bills.
Or maybe that's just my optimism kicking in.
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No, it's like someone of whatever color trying to bring his pogo stick onto the golf course and being denied. Play by the rules and you are welcome; damage the turf through selfish flouting of the rules and we throw you out.
I think you answered yourself. Sure, it would help for a week, but then the method would become ineffective, and we'd be stuck with it. Useless, and with more overhead to boot. No, Scott Richter just needs to be shut down, period. You can't kill all of the cockroaches, but you can kill the big ones that can't run fast, and like to give TV interviews.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
The only way to eliminate SPAM is to make it unprofitable. Since the world is full of fools, we can't count on them to just not respond to SPAM so we need to reduce the numbers of SPAM messages sent by the spammers.
We need some sort of real-time, content-driven connection throttling on the mail servers of the world, so as to reduce the number of SPAM that can be sent in any given time. The inbound mail can be analysed on-the-fly and if the word pen1s or vi@gara is detected, throttle the connection so that mail takes 60 seconds to send.
Throttling will only affect mass mailings. Who cares if their legitimate mail about V.I.C.O.D.I.N is delayed by 60 seconds? And there will be no false-positive difficulties because all mail will eventually get delivered. But bulk-mailers will discover that they can send far fewer SPAM in a day, which drops their response rate and their profitability. Hopefully to the point where they can't sustain their business any more.
And if they did that, the ISPs (and others wishing to block spam) could use that 'signifying' characteristic to block the spam and would not need to refer to spamcop (or other blocking lists).
I think this is a really bad move from OIRB, in the long run.
If you're an ISP that's providing connectivity to a spammer, you will get on a number of centralized blacklists, like SpamCop's list. Once this starts to affect your business, you kick the spammers out, and get off these lists. That's how the lists are supposed to work.
However, if the centralized lists are prohibited from blocking you, people will start adding you on their own blacklists. Eventually, you will be on thousands of different lists that are updated manually and that you don't know about... and no matter how hard you kick out the spammers, you will remain on these lists practically forever, since there is no central authority that you can ask to remove you.
Now that Iron-(plays boths sides of the fence)-Port owns Spamcop, I don't care what happens to them. It's just a shame I renewed my account there only a couple of months before they were bought.
Listwashing. Each single complaint represents thousands(?) of people that Just Hit Delete or filtered it to /dev/null. After a while, Snotty's mailing list has a lot of the people who will complain about spam tagged as "do not send" as well as "confirmed good email". Then he'll sell his lists to other spammers with the first tag stripped off...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If Spamcop's been told to lay off for a week, what's to stop us individuals from all contacting them and their ISP seperately to fill the void?
I'll bet if enough people contacted both the judge, and their internet provider, they'll begin to see that it's not just a small group of malcontents harrassing a business. Instead it's a lot of pissed off people sick of them and their family's being bombarded with porn and male enhancement ads, so let's make it apparent who the judge is hurting by stupid ruling's such as this (Even if it is only for a week).
Charging for e-mail won't work. First thing that would happen would be that most everyone (spammer and non-spammer) would stop using e-mail. I know I would. Charging for e-mail is nothing more than an incentive to stop using e-mail.
The users would migrate to other internet alternatives that would replace e-mail such as nstant messaging systems altered to do what e-mail does, or other Internet techniques to allow the exchange of messages.
Then, you'd have to charge a tax on each message in IM. Then we'd be forced to switch over to some sort of message-board based system to exchange messages. Then the tax would come to that. Next, it would be Kazaa or p2p where we'd be exchanging text messages instead of music files. The spammers would follow to this, and then it would be taxed too.
Basically, e-mail is no different from anything else on the internet: packets of bytes sent to/from IP addresses. What makes e-mail so different that it can be taxed without taxing other packets of bytes being sent to/from IP addresses?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
One of the most valuable commodity to a spammer is known good email addresses. Why should we give him more.
The ISP should simply ignore the complaints, do a spot audit of his spamming, or just get rid of him because almost nobody wants spam anyway.
It's very simple. It's interfering with his business. Whether or not his business is legal is another question. But I was expecting that eventually somebody would win against these blacklists. They're interfering with businesses, and they're blocking communications. Whether or not people want them to do it is irrelevant. You can't intentionally stop anybody else from doing business, and that's exactly what Spamcop, Spamhaus, etc. are doing. They're all going to be ordered to stop at some point. What they're doing is on par with is a telephone company that owned switches in the middle of the country decided to stop carrying your calls because they didn't like you, or possibly someobyd cutting your businesses telephone lines. What they're doing may or not be good, but whatever the case is, what they're doing is illegal and indefensible.
How is this different from OIRB suing me when I delete one of their spams? SpamCop is selling a service that deletes it for me so I don't have to deal with it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
First, I know nothing of OIRB specifically. However, please don't assume that all email marketing companies are spammers. It just isn't true. I work for a company that does email marketing, and our server has had the same IP address for over a year, and all of our emails come from the same domain, with clear opt-out instructions (in addition, you had to have opted in directly to have received it to begin with).
There are some of us companies who actually do send legitimate email where the recipients are trying _to_ receive the message rather than trying to block us. I have personally walked many people through turning down their anti-spam software to make sure our messages get through to their system.
Anyway, I think it would be wise to be sure that we remember that not all commercial marketing email is bad, or else I'll wake up one day and half.com will no longer be sending me email updates about which books I want have come in at the price I specified (which is in fact the most effective form of email marketing).
Engineering and the Ultimate
They are doing no such thing. They are informing the rest of the world "So-and-so is a spammer". The rest of the world rejects messages from so-and-so, or not, as it chooses.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Irrelevant analogy. Richter already knows that he is a pariah, and knows exactly what he must do (stop spamming) to fix the situation. He simply needs to be sufficiently pressured to do so (which will probably require getting him kicked off ISP after ISP until he can no longer find a host).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The judge should have rejected this on the face of it.
Might as well issue a restraining order against a victom carrying mace to protect herself from a stalker.
Yes stalking is orders of magantude worse but restraining orders like this should not be permitted.
I have no doupt the judge didn't even understand the complaint. This has become the issue lately.
Judges who "don't get it" IE don't actually understand what is happening.
Impartal but not to the point of pure ignorence.
Search warents and restraining orders have been issued by judges who don't know what they are doing.
IANAL. I think you should be able to challange the lagitemacy of warents and orders (can you?) and if a judge has issued 3 such items that have proven fraudulent or inappropreate he shouldn't be permitted to issue anymore.
A search warent is bad enough. Remember Steve Jackson Games? Got a search warent over a card game and had everything taken. Never charged and got everything back after it long became obsolete.
In effect someone tried to shut down a game company becouse they didn't approve of a card game.
Now say if this were to happen to a small indupendent newspaper? Just cease the printing press (maybe just the computers printer) and the computers (maybe just 1 iMac).
Restraining orders are worse. Let's say Nintendo got a restraining order against Microsoft over the release of the X Box. Then Nintendo could force Microsoft to miss the critical Christmas shopping season.
Just use it to stall something when timming is critical.
Can't carry mace, Can't block spam, Can't defend yourself, Can't avoid harrasment.
Just get a restraining order from a judge who dosen't know better.
With computers being more and more part of socity maybe we should require judges take some sort of technology test just to see if they are at least know what is being requested when a spammer asks for a restraining order.
I don't actually exist.
We, as a community, should put more efforts in the education of our politicians. They are the only people who can create and accept legislation which in the end will force judges to stop listening to a spammers whining.
Until we succeed in that, our technical battle is quite hopeless. That hurts yes, but I'm sure most people will agree with me. A few years ago, a blacklist was very useful. Today you end up being sued by the same people who force you to buy bigger mailservers. Sad.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
You *are* a convicted felon, dear Snotty.
You've also made a career out of lying to your customers. You tell them your lists are opt-in only, targeted and all that. Yet your lists are full of harvested addresses, role accounts, spamtraps, and other junk.
I would love to discuss all this with you, but I doubt you have anything else to say to me than "bullshit, you anti-commerce net nazi fuck".
The day the parasites and sociopaths like you dissappear from the face of the earth is a good day.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
And that one guy knew how to reach you.
If he'd sent that email and its headers to a spam-filtering service, they would have said "one complaint, clear and truthful headers, he's some wanker who signed up and is too stupid to un-sign himself." If that one complaint got forwarded to an ISP, the same thing would have happened. It's when they get 1,000 complaints about the same thing, and it takes a detective to figure out who it really came from, that it's an issue and they try to do something about it.
The country, and commerce, got by very nicely for hundreds of years without email, let alone spam. If worst came to worst, they could continue to get by without any email at all just like they did ten or fifteen years ago.
But, again, the issue is not commercial email. I just got done reading my opt-in email, and I'm about to place an order with Omaha Steaks. I read their print ad, went to their website, signed up for their email list, and I buy steaks from them. We're both happy. That's how commercial email should work.
The legitimate commercial emailers should be -- and some of them are -- in the forefront of the anti-spam fight. Take those folks with the tasty steaks: how much does it hurt their business because their customers have to sort through a hundred ads for penis enlarger pills to find this month's gourmet steak special? How much more do they have to pay for bandwidth because some hideous percentage of the available bandwidth is carrying spam? How much damage does it do to them when someone fakes their headers to get ads for fake Viagra through spam filters? They -- the businesses -- are getting hurt as much if not more than individual users.
Among other things, these "legitimate businesses" who just want their right of "free speech" are using networks of zombie computers recruited by various net worms to send out their spam for them. That's about as legitimate as a telemarketer tapping your phone line and making sales calls on it. I'd like to see how the "free commercial speech" argument would hold up if some company ever pulled that one. That alone should show you what kind of people are involved here.
Look at it this way: If the way you run a government requires you to move from safe house to safe house every night, have multiple decoys impersonating you, and wear body armor at all times, you're probably doing something wrong. If the way you run a business requires you to go to great lengths to disguise the identity of your business and the products you're selling . . . well, that should tell you something too.
First, I know nothing of OIRB specifically. However, please don't assume that all email marketing companies are spammers. It just isn't true. I work for a company that does email marketing, and our server has had the same IP address for over a year, and all of our emails come from the same domain, with clear opt-out instructions (in addition, you had to have opted in directly to have received it to begin with).
Remember that the U in UCE stands for Unrequested. If all your mail really is requested, then you aren't sending Spam. I get mail from my bank, and although it's commercial, it certainly isn't Spam.
I bet I get Requested Commercial Email from at least 10 companies, and I'm sure than most slashdotters do to.
Fact check:
SPEWS removes entries, sometimes within minutes or hours, of a truthful post to news.admin.net-abuse.blocklists (moderated) or NANAE (unmoderated). If you are unsuccessful in being removed, there are helpful people in those groups who can tell you what needs to be done to remove the listing.
Reminder:
Flames and rants aren't removal requests nor pleas for help.
A genuine opt-in message shouldn't have advertising within the confirmation message, it should just say 'At 10:30am from IP signed up for the vicodin user's mailing list. Please click on this link or respond to this message to join the list"
The other thing you get is that if you DO get complaints, you can pull out their confirmation mail, complete with headers to show that they did sign up. You could forge the confirmation messages, but forging their ISP's headers will be more difficult.
Actually, I probably wouldn't have a problem with you, as long as the lack of complaints is legit. I've heard is that a vanishingly small percentage complain, and fewer still complain to the right place.
Even if you are legit, without confirmation I won't have sympathy if you get in trouble with your ISP for some moron forge-subscribing your mailing list to addresses harvested from news.admin.net-abuse.email
Here is a problem--Many of the "reply to remove" or "click to remove" instructions are actually "click to add". I've proved this to my satisfaction experimentally: Got a spam in one account, "replied" to the remove address from a new, otherwise unused and non-guessable account. Result? The new account started getting spam. I can't tell the difference between scammers and mistakes.
Some of the remove links are dead, some want a password, some have other hoops.
Confirmed opt
I not only hoping you loose the case against SPAMCOP, AOS, MICROSOFT et al, i hope they NAIL YOUR SCUMMY LITTLE COMPANIES TO THE WALL, and prove to everyone just what MORONIC IDIOTS you are in practicing this BARELY LEGAL "marketing" activity that would be BANNED IN VIRTUALLY ANY OTHER MEDIA.
:-)
I hope Scott Richter is tied naked to the back of a truck and dragged thru a field of broken glass for several miles. Then, every inch of his lacerated body be covered in salt and put on public display under the banner "Human Colostomy Bag." Rabid baboons (shot up with PCP and aphrodisiacs) will be put in his cage to have their way with him and he will be fed only ground-up, amputated parts of his own body until there's nothing left to feed him and he starves to death so his remains can be buried under a public toilet in a Texas chili restaurant.
Now that's theraputic
If you're running any sort of list without confirmed opt-in you're allowing your list to be used for a variety of nuisance attacks. Don't like someone? Subscribe them to as many single opt-in lists as possible. It's the modern day equivalent of taking a bunch of subscription cards from magazines at the library and subscribing someone you don't like to them. This is worse because it's so easy. As someone who has suffered exactly this sort of attack, it's extremely frustrating.
Confirmed opt-in isn't some sort of crazy, rare idea. It's increasingly common. People will learn to deal with them. Modern mailing list packages provide very clear messages explaining what is going on and how to get onto the list. It's almost identical to email confirmed account creation which is effectively the standard for getting a free account on any web site these days.
Until you've faced 70 hostile sign up messages in a day, you don't really appreciate how frustrating this is. It's not potentially useful, it's a time wasting mess. I shouldn't need to read each message to determine how to unsubscribe from each list (this one require a response email, this one requires a specially formatted message to another address, this one requires visiting a web site, this one requires logging into a web site, this one doesn't provide any details on how to unsubscribe at all!). Worse, it's possible that the message is actually a test message from a spammer; anyone who tries to unsubscribe will be added to the known good list.
What you describe isn't confirmed opt-in; it's just plain old forgery. Spammers already forge patterns for various tools already (as I look at the piles of faked eBay "Question for seller" and "WARNING: Cannot deliver to yahoo.com" messages in my mailbox). The response will be the same as always; mark it as spam (if you're using a trained system) and move on. This would change nothing for spammers. It will, however, make it much easier to distinguish the companies tries to do play fair.
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No, your point is that you were inconvienced by SPEWS, and you want somebody to squash them for you...
Sorry, no. SPEWS maintains a list within the terms that they set. They aren't explicitly claiming that "the guy at this IP is a spammer", just that an IP is blacklisted for one of various reasons.
You could just as well say that a store's security system is slandering you by calling you a theif, just because it beeps as you walk out the door... It's really a stretch to consider SPEWS as libel.
If you really hate SPEWS, then start asking postmasters not to use them. I have a similar problem with the SORBS DUL, but I'm not asking for them to be sued, shutdown, etc.
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