Slashdot Mirror
Accused Spammer to Debate SpamCop Founder
Weezle writes "Wired News is reporting that OptInRealBig's Scott Richter is going to debate SpamCop's Julian Haight in public next month. Richter had the nerve to file a lawsuit against SpamCop recently claiming that the blacklist keeps his company from sending out 'marketing messages.' (in lay terms, spam) Not surprisingly, Richter himself is being sued for $20 million by NY Att. General Eliot Spitzer. Sounds like it's going to be a real nasty fight."
Sounds like it's going to be a real nasty fight.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the referee stops this fight early. I'm expecting both of them to fight dirty... Julian Haight tries hard but often swings first and aims later, while Scott Richter says he plays by the rules but morals have never really stood in his way.
There's no way they're gonna go the scheduled twelve rounds!
For those who wish to opt out...
OptInRealBig.com, LLC.
(303) 464-8164
info@optinbig.com
1333 W 120th AVE
Suite 101
Westminster, CO 80234
US
OptInRealBig publicly debating SpamCop on the legality of spam is like Charles Manson publicly debating Vincent Bugliosi on the legality of committing mass murder.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Lawyers for both sides said they have agreed to allow the debate because they believe it will not focus on the lawsuit.
Uhm... two guys suing each other in public and they're not going to talk about the legal alligations either has leveled about the other? Sounds like some lawyers won't be members of the Bar Association much longer.
I would so pay $50 to watch this on pay per view
..and can I bring my baseball bat?
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
you mean Richer is going to get SERVED, then I agree, it's on!
That CSS file that blocks ads
I believe it is still legal to send marketing spams as long as the recepients have given consent, no?
How can we, the spam victims, prove that we NEVER gave consent to such-and-such website?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I don't think SpamCop is going to be winning this one, because OptInRealBig has all of those email addresses at their disposal. Just a few mass mailings is all it takes to get public opinion on their side.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
IMHO the debate between these two should end right there. This is like a "do not call" list. People are bombarded with advertising at every turn. We should have a right to be left alone.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Blacklist operators like to say they just provide a service to the sysadmins; it's the owners of the recipient servers who do the blocking. But by the same logic, credit reporting agencies just provide a service to merchants and lenders; it's those lenders who refuse your application. Yet Congress has seen fit to pass the Fair Credit Reporting Act to stop abuses by the credit bureaus; despite the fact that they don't actually deny you a loan, it is obvious the power they have over individuals and the ways they can abuse it, EVEN IF that power is granted to them indirectly by lenders. I would argue that the same could be said of blacklists; arguably, they could (and perhaps should) be regulated for the same reasons that credit bureaus are.
As a marketer you have the right to send out ad's. As a consumer, I have the right to block your shit. Fuck off, excuse the language.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Please...someone...tell me they are merging with SCO soon. I'd really rather focus all my angers at one company instead of two.
sending out 'marketing messages.' (in lay terms, spam)
marketing messages do not always equal spam. For example, Apple sends me marketing messages all the time, and they're not spam.
also, in 'lay terms' (think you mean "layman's terms") 'spam' would be "sending you mail you don't ask for", and 'marketing messages' are not always 'spam'.
i don't mean to get on a rant here, but also:
if you have to explain 'marketing messages' also explain 'spamcop' and 'blacklist' and 'OptInRealBig'. explaining what marketing messages (a plain english term) are, and not explaining other terms the readers might not know about portrays you as a zealot, which you may or may not be. if portraying yourself as a zealot is what you were after, i should say that zealots have ZERO credibility because they are (by definition) fanatical and unreasoning.
anyway, thanks for the links, and please put a little bit more thought into your blurbs.
from sending out 'marketing messages.' (in lay terms, spam)
That's called High Volume Email Deployment, not spam.
And Julian Haight is not Anti High Volume Email Deployment, he's anti-spam.
bash$
I hope the line to serve him will not be too long.
Fight Spammers!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's been a whole 20 minutes and we don't have aerial photos of this guy's house and his home address for our snail-mail DDOS attack yet.
They're annoying, but they're not the problem. I used to get OptInRealBig messages. I clicked on the "unsubscribe" links a few times. They stopped coming.
All of Richter's emails (at least that I've seen) come with contact information for the sending company and unsubscribe instructions as required by law. And as far as I've seen, the unsubscribe instructions work. If anybody here has unsubscribed from OIRB and still gotten mailings, that's different. But as far as I've seen, OIRB uses real reply-to's, real headers, and really only gets addresses that left a "email me" checkbox checked somewhere.
Richter is annoying, but he's not the main spam problem. He runs a real company that complies with the letter if not the spirit of the law. The real problem is hijacked boxes and east Asian server farms sending billions of fraudulant, forged, difficult-to-trace messages every day. Shutting down Richter and easing the burdens on people too stupid to uncheck the "let partners email me" checkbox won't solve that.
All's true that is mistrusted
Just as people have a right to speak, others have a right to not listen.
If the spammers were civil and provided a way to honestly opt-out, I don't think there'd be much debate. As it is, "opt-out" options are used to verify legitimate mail addresses to which more spam is sent.
The essence of fairness is respect. If spammers were to respect the wishes of email participants, these drastic blacklist measures would not be necessary.
Just as a person may not be allowed to speak at a public forum with no curtailment of free speech, so an ISP may filter spam with no curtailment of free speech. Plus, as SpamCop merely provides a service (the identification of spam black-hole lists), they are not themselves curtailing free speech. If I (as an individual) decide to pre-filter my email by using SpamCop, I have also not curtailed the free speech rights of spammers; I have merely invoked my right to not listen.
If SpamCop is inhibited in any way by first amendment arguments, justice has been subverted. Since SpamCop itself is opt-in, they are providing more free speech than the spammers themselves.
Granted, I am not a lawyer, one of the many things of which I am glad. (I don't see how many lawyers sleep at night, but then again, I fret when I realize I only left a 15% tip instead of a 20% tip.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Appellants challenge the constitutionality of Title III of the Postal Revenue and Federal Salary Act of 1967, 81 Stat. 645, 39 U.S.C. 4009 ( 1964 ed., Supp. IV), under which a person may require that a mailer remove his name from its mailing lists and stop all future mailings to the householder. The appellants are publishers, distributors, owners, and operators of mail order houses, mailing list brokers, and owners and operators of mail service organizations whose business activities are affected by the challenged statute.
A new law had recently been passed whereby people could demand that unsolicited pr0n no longer be mailed to their houses. The homeowners didn't want free samples mailed to their kids. The pr0n magazines wanted to show everybody what they were missing and claimed absolute right to do so under the guise of the First Amendment. (Sound like a familiar battle?) The Supreme Court found against the postal spammers.
Some very relevant passages from the decision:
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
By the actions of Scott I'd say he actually believes his system is a true opt in system.
...
However I've receaved spam from this guy and I know I never opted in.
So the question is how come Scott believes his actions are lagit?
Answer:
I do get a lot of "Welcome" messages from marketting lists. Most of them say something like "Please click on the link below to conferm". Eather spammers are being creative and trying to trick me into opting in to stuff I don't have any intrest in or someone spammed my e-mail address to them.
How dose ReallyBig work? Could a jerk spammer stuff the box?
How dose Scott get a large opt in e-mail database?
It would make sense that he would have some program set up where third partys do the opt in for him. If so is there any screening for "stuffing the box"?
This presumes Scott isn't putting on a show. We can never forget that spammers are at least in part con artists. They take the PT Barnem school of marketting tactic. A sucker born every min and the real trick is to find em.
However I'm reminded of some research done a while back. Someone said that most spammers are just looking for valid e-mail addresses and don't actually sell anything.
Hence the mark isn't the spam targets but the spammers who actually try to sell stuff.
Thies people buy e-mail addresses.
And I just did conclude that this is probably where Scott got his marketting list.
In short...
Scott is this minuts sucker
Or the modern PT Barnum.
Sadly you can never know for sure.
I don't actually exist.
They're not EVIL, but of all the big blacklists, SpamCop is the least regulated. The whole idea of letting people submit addresses/domains to a blacklist with little or no verification is crazy.
I'd be happier if Spamhaus was doing this debate. They run things the right way.
Free speech is garanteed, correct. But where does the constitution say anything about garanteeing an audience?? If you do not like a public debate, you leave. It follows that if you do not like spam, you leave the list, but no! If they want to compare it to real life, they should make it a real comparaison - including a "leave" option. Obviously this is not going to happen, as that's whan they loose all their "customers" (ahem, victims). However the comparaison to speech is not valid if one cannot plug his ears.
-------
1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
It doesn't matter whether they opted in or not. Those people feel his spam is unwelcome, and somehow illegitimately obtained their email address.
It doesn't matter what hoops he jumped through. All that matters as that in the eyes of consumers his company was in error, and cannot be trusted with what is normally benign personal information.
Spam is a statement about the unwelcomness of the email, not whether someone might have left a "I hate puppies" checkbox unchecked. If the people recieving the mail say it is spam. It's spam. End of story. SpamCop collects these opinions and merges them into a fact. Many people consider Scott Richter to be willingly, misleadingly, and habbitually sending vast quantities of undesirable email, and generally being a nuisance. That many people have this opinion is a fact. Now it may be true, or untrue. But over a large number of iterations it is probably an accurate predictor of what is true.
The only thing shaky is SpamCop is making an argument ad populum. And knowing who those people are doesn't change that. However, this is more than mitigated by the fact that sysadmins use this to make a likely better experience for their users. Other people would wish this to go away, my users might too, people being mostly similar.
That all these people think Scott Richter is a spammer is not libel. In fact it's accurate, particularly in light of a The Daily Show interview. Why even his government officials think he's a spammer. Were I to claim, "I have pictures of Scott Richter raping an underage goat in Tijauna. The goat was "pitching," but man you should see the smile on Scott's face!" and not have such pictures. That would be libel. I for one doubt the existance of such pictures, I was just using that as a possible example. And if someone does have such pictures, I would appreciate it if they were never sent to me. In fact it might just be better to burn them, the internet is awful enough as it is.
Scott doesn't have a God given right to make sure everyone gets his mail. Sorry. He doesn't. Just like anyone can refuse him entry into their place of business or home for any reason based on his actions, or their thoughts on him as a terribly flawed and failed human being. That's all people who are using spamcop are doing. No dice Scott, your business isn't welcome here, we don't like you, people don't like you, go sell your penis enhancements in China.
We'll see just how ethical they are about their unsubscribe.
Seconds before writing this response, I created an email alias called "optinbig@domainwitheld.com" and instructed optinbig.com to unsubscribe me from all.
Mind you I JUST CREATED this address and it has never before been used for anything. If it starts getting spam, then it's clear they are using the information to send more spam.
I expect to receive spam within the next hour personally...
The "Notable early accomplishments" read very strangely. They seem to have been drafted for maximum deniability. "Developed ten primary subject packets developed and for referral to Law Enforcement" "We are already planning meetings to ensure that this initiative is on track, and to further define the scope and packaging of this activity are being planned." Doesn't sound like a major roundup of criminals is in the works.
The FBI doesn't actually produce many arrests per hour expended. The FBI's Baltimore-based child porno operation produces about 1.6 arrests per agent year. They have 200 agents on that operation, or about 2% of their agent staff. (The FBI isn't that big. There are only about 12,000 agents. The NYPD is four times as large.) So to shut down 100 spammers per year, they'd probably have to devote about 75 agents to the operation, which is a big bite for them.
There's a notable drop in reports on 28 april 2004. The exact day two US-spammers were arrested. (see eweek.com)
A handful other spammers in jail, and the spam-rate will drop to below 5% of todays volume.
I agree. It's a little annoying to spend 10 minutes writing a response from a user's technical help request, only to have that user bounce the message because their provider uses SpamCop, and SpamCop has blocked your entire ISP.
Since you only have the user's email address you have no way of contacting them, even to tell them that you can't contact them because of SpamCop!
So you contact SpamCop and they take this high-handed approach and won't help you. You contact the ISP, but they don't do anything either, so you are stuck. Also, they don't seem to check anything but just take any complaints at face value.
So in the case of self-appointed spam vigilantes like SpamCop, unfortunately the cure is worse then the disease. Likewise the spam filters that fill my inbox with "virus detected in message which contained your forged from address" alerts.
I prefer the system EarthLink uses where you have to confirm the message is genuine.
some targets for slashdotters out there - DoS or a wget loop would be appreciated:
Chinese spammer
And yet another one
home loan spammer
junk health spammer
Brave man! Not to mention, reckless...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Now that we know where Scott Richter's going to be - upcoming Email Technology Conference in San Francisco, we need action against that asshole that fills our emailboxes with spam.
/.
1. Go to your local supermarket
2. Buy a can or two of SPAM or a cheaper generic substitute
3. Conceal the can in a bag or coat
4. Attend the conference and bring a digital camera with you.
5. Get a nice seat closer to the front
6. Wait until Richter is comfortable enough to let his guard down
7. Open can of spam and place the contents in your hand
8. Launch contents in your hand at Richter
9. Repeat steps 7 and 8 until you're out of SPAM
10. Take a picture or Richter covered with spam w/ a digital camera
11. Post it on
Oh yeah...
12. ????
13. Profit!!!
You might need to do some more prep work as far as hurling SPAM at targets. Get a friend to help you, organize SPAM throwing practice sessions. Get all the participants to come with you to the debate.
Alternative plan
1. Go to your local sports store
2. Buy a baseball bat.
3. You know the rest...