AOL Files First Spim Lawsuit

Iphtashu Fitz writes "CNet News is reporting that 4 major internet providers - AOL, Earthlink, Microsoft, and Yahoo, have filed another bunch of lawsuits against spammers. What makes this round interesting is that AOL has filed the first ever lawsuit against against spam that targets Instant Messenger clients, or spim. So far spim has only affected relatively small numbers of users but the problem is growing, which is why AOL is targeting it now."

Comments

Glad to see they're acting now

[Mike Rubits]

All I have to say is THANK GOD. ICQ was destroyed by spam for many people, and AIM is heading down that path.

Re:Glad to see they're acting now

[toddestan]

Now that everyone uses AIM and MSN, spam on ICQ is virtually gone. I probably haven't gotten a single spam in atleast a year and half.

Re:Glad to see they're acting now

[leitec]

I agree that it's heading down that path, perhaps at a quicker rate soon. But I fail to see how exactly that's a "THANK GOD" thing. I live in the US and haven't ever encountered a friend who uses MSN, ICQ or Yahoo, with the exception of some European exchange friends I had in high school. AIM is still by far the easiest IM protocol to implement (I've done it, OSCAR is quite simple and has been documented pretty thoroughly by third parties) - though I've admittedly never looked at Jabber. Sure, I could be ideologically sound with an open sourced IM protocol, but it's nice to have non-nerd people to talk to. It works just fine for me.

the most un-r fa ever

[evilmousse]

fools, r-t-f-a.
I've never seen more people correcting a mistake that never happened here on /. ..hey how about that for a ./ article, the top 10 most mis-commented-on /. articles...

Re:buyer problem

[gphinch]

While good in theory, this really can only go so far. It's the same problem as infomercials and telemarketers, only on a grander scale and lower cost. At the same time, sending out, say, 5 million spam messages costs not much more than 500. Even if they got a return of .01%, thats still 500 people buying their penis-enlarging mortgage widget at the low cost of only $39.95. Do that every day and it's hard not to see the incentive for spammers. They can probably afford lawsuits now and again (or to go hide in a more liberally-lawed country). The answer to this, as well as a lot of fraud issues, is some sort of email tracking system and not SMTP.

Re:Must...overcome...AOL...prejudice...

[wo1verin3]

Still a nuisance with tech support that was outsourced to India. I needed to speak to someone today at AOL as the AOL 9 spyware scanner detected one of our files as spyware when it wasn't. After 8 transfers, 4 phone numbers, and 3 disconnections I finally figured out why I wasn't getting anyway, I was talking to outsourced tech support in India which kept asking if I could log in even though I clearly explained I'm not a customer and wouldn't install it on my own machine if my life depended on it.

So you're telling me

[techsoldaten]

Point:

So you're telling me that with all the access control features in IM - warnings and blocks in AOL, and the user acceptance feature in Yahoo - there are not effective user level tools for combating spim already?

I used to receive spim on ICQ all the time, to the point where I had to get a new address and stop using my old one on public lists. That was bad.

The fact that I have received no spim to date on any other medium testifies to the fact this would be a hard adoption.

Counterpoint:

It would suck to be receiving IMs for Viagra while I am trying to type an email. The threat of that alone should be justification for absolute prejudice in dealing with these spim dudes.

M

How To

[RichM]

This'll probably get me modded down, but I was once asked to create a spim Perl script for somebody (for money) and here's the source:

#!usr/bin/perl
if ($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq 'GET')
{
@pairs = split(/&/, $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'});
}
elsif ($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq 'POST')
{
read (STDIN, $buffer, $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'});
@pairs = split(/&/, $buffer);
if ($ENV{'QUERY_STRING'})
{
@getpairs = split(/&/, $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'});
push(@pairs,@getpairs);
}
}
else
{
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "Use the POST or GET methods."; }
foreach $pair (@pairs) { ($key, $value) = split (/=/, $pair);
$key =~ tr/+/ /; $key =~ tr/+/ /;
$key =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg;
$value =~ tr/+/ /; $value =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C",
hex($1))/eg ;
$value =~ s///g; if ($formdata{$key}) { $formdata{$key} .= ", $value";
}
else { $formdata{$key} = $value; } } 1;
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "Sent message from $formdata{'sendername'}, to
$formdata{'recipient'}!";
use lib '.';
use Net::AIM;
$aim = new Net::AIM;
$conn = $aim->newconn (Screenname => $formdata{'sendername'},
Password => $formdata{'password'});
foreach my $i (0..4) {
$aim->do_one_loop || last;
sleep 1;
}
$aim->send_im ( $formdata{'recipient'},$formdata{'message'});
sle ep 1;
print "";

It takes the following variables:
$sendername, $password (for AOL login), $recipient and $message by either POST or GET.
I kinda regret doing it now but it paid the rent at the time...

Note to /. editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time a new word like "spim" is introduced, don't put quotations around it. That way it's easier for the moderators to mod down 20 people who commented without reading the fucking article.

It's just saves us all time so the rest of us don't have to read comments by these people.

Re:Spim?

[MacGod]

So, if spim is IM spam, shouldn't email spam have been named spem?