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Massachusetts Atty. General Forces Spammer to Pay
Cildar writes "The Attorney General of Massachusetts has forced a Florida spammer to pay a $25,000 fine and enter into a cease and desist order. The original suit contained both state consumer protection theories as well as allegations of CAN-SPAM violations. Here is the Attorney General's press release.
I don't think these court "settlements" slow this guy down at all. He was also successfully sued and ordered to pay $104,104 this past April. You can read about that case here. I am wondering if it is the case that he makes so much money sending spam that these fines and settlements are no more than the cost of doing business.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Actually with SpamAssassin 3 and the latest bayesian, within days I stopped almost all of my spam. Even as spam gets 'smarter', my bayes filter will too. I have Amavis + Postfix doing the other routine filtering. Life is good now.
Like Ebaums World? You'll love Shizzville
I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to your out of context post, but the reason that we consider raping the rapist to be morally bankrupt is that rape is an awful violation of somebody's human rights, even if that person has themselves committed that crime. Spam, while an annoyance and a pain in the ass, is not a violation of human rights, just a negative externality (and one I certainly despise). So the point is that when a thief gets something stolen from him or a spammer gets spammed, it's not comparable to a rapist being raped. As to the effectiveness as a means of prophylaxis or rehabilitation, I'm not sure that ANY means of punishment have been shown to be effective in those ways.
Actually, exile was more likely than death. Tribes didn't get around to killing people for offenses until they started to run out of places to exile them to.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
That does look pretty cut and dried that they are not deductible.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
I've seen this many times before, here on /. too, and it makes me sick. It's not like he was an incumbent that was so bad he lost to a dead guy (which would be one thing). He was the challenger. He lost to a very popular man who died VERY shortly before the election. They couldn't change the ballot. Some (many?) people saw voting for him as a way to honor his memory.
Now I'm not going to pretend to know whether Mel Carnahand, a.k.a. "the dead guy", was good or not. I won't pretend to know whether his wife (who got the seat he won) is any good. I don't live in Missouri so it doesn't effect me personally. But if you are going to pick on someone you don't like for political reasons... GROW UP and do it in a more mature way (like with real, relevant facts). "He must be dum and abizmul at his job 'cause he lost to a dead guy! Ha ha ha". Grow up. Have a little respect.
And it wouldn't matter if Ashcroft was a good AG (I'm not saying he is or isn't). Chances are he would be replaced with the change of administration anyway.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
what rock have u been hiding under?
worm stalks Linux machines
I'm not out of order! You're out of order! The whole freaking system's out of order!
If slashdot lefties are gonna talk the haughty talk of the lawyer, at least get it right. You can't 'enter into a cease and desist order.' You can enter into an agreement to cease and desist, but not the order itself.
Dawn of the Dead
What's your excuse for getting spam?
Some people use the internet for more than just playtime, Threehead. Some of us have to maintain legitimate whois contact info for all the domains we're responsible for, and can't just go changing our email addresses every time another fuckload of spam rolls in.
It rises above the basement-level spammer, but it would make sense to me that these people invest some money into legal advice and setup a series of shell companies with obfuscated ownership so that if they run afoul of some law, company A can declare bankruptcy and skip out on some of the fine and (possibly new) company C can take over.
Civil fines presume that you're dealing with businesses that are basically honest. I think people involved in spammer are basically dishonest, and while a few that operate as sole proprietorships will pay fines and be "watchable" by government agencies. Even major corporations largely just pay the fines, raise their prices, and ignore it.
This is part of the reason I think civil fines will never work with spamming, only criminal fines and lengthy prison sentnces from RICO-type investigations that follow the money trail and catch everyone participating in the enterprise, including any "legitimate" businesses aware of the nature of the business.
If a credit-card processor and/or an ISP that knew about the nature of their client's business was indicted, fined $250,000 and jailed for 10 years in a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, the ties to banking and interest services that spammers need would be hard to come by in the future as ISPs and credit card processors who otherwise have a viable business wouldn't be willing to host spam or run spam credit processing -- even at 10x fee rates, it's not worth losing your home and spending the next 10 years dodging the Aryan Brotherhood in the shower.
What bothers me is why, given the high level of fraud in spam, the Feds haven't done much to follow the money trail. Either the money is too good for legit players on the sidelines and enforcement has become politicized ("Investigate us and we don't contribute to your boss' campaign.") or they just don't care.