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

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...