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Microsoft Sues Spammers
mclearn writes "Microsoft has filed seven more lawsuits against spammers, this time targeting those who violate the 'brown-paper wrapper' provision of the CAN-SPAM law, which sets rules for sexually oriented e-mail solicitations.
Apparently these are a small part of over 120 spam-related cases Microsoft is currently litigating. With Microsoft's deep pockets, can they effectively send a resounding message to spammers?"
With Microsoft's deep pockets, can they effectively send a resounding message to spammers?
Yeah... Don't spam XXX material... just the regular garbage... Anyone who thinks this is going to make much difference, is either nieve or stupid - possibly both.
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
I have to say despite all the M$ hatred we all feel for their many security flaws and and horrible software for once I think Microsoft may be acting in the best intrests of the community, with basically no direct benefit to them. Even if it doesn't kill spam (which I don't think anything has the possibility of doing) it might shut down a few or few hundred spammers, and that is a start. I have to say for once I have some nice feelings toward the evil monopoly.
Philosophy.
if most /.ers took the blinkers from around their eyes they might actually see that as well as doing evil in the name of profit, Microsoft also does good.
As we pass laws in the US against spam, and start enforcing them, all it will ultimately do is drive the spamming operations out of the country. There will always be some small poor nation willing to let these paracites stay as long as they generate some tax revenue and keep a few locals employed. Blocking international email traffic isn't a viable option, so there is little we will be able to do about it.
Given that, I have moral objections to spammers and am pleased each time I hear of one getting what he or she deserves.
Well of course ... they run one of the biggest email operations out there so it'd be in their best interest to eliminate spam, since it only hurts them. It's no surprise, really.
Who doesn't like free music?
But it will help. All technology, lawsuits, and prosecution helps slow the increase (hopefully to the point of making it negative) of spam. Technology and lawsuits both make spam a less profitable proposition. The less spam that gets through, the less sales you make. The more spammers that get sued and lose their ass, the less likely the average spammer is to come out ahead. The more spammers get locked up, the more scary a proposition it is to new ones.
It's all about making it less attractive. It will always be attractive to some, even if thepbenalty is death by anal probe. However the numbers CAN be reduced by things like this.
Up till receantly, all it took to be a spammer was a total lack of ethics. There was basically no risk. You wouldn't get sued, and there was no law against it. Combine that with the returns, you had a lot of people lining up.
Well now there IS a risk. You can get your sued to the point of losing everything, and locked up in jail for a good long time. Also the returns will continue to get worse as more and more gets blocked.
We can never expcet to get rid of spam completely, but with effort we can curtail it. It's not like drugs where people demand it, actively seek it out, and will pay massive amount of money for it. Most people, even those that buy from it, don't want to get it. Thus all you really need to do is make it unattractive to people and most of it will die off.
Microsoft has such an ungodly amount of money already that you might as well root for them, since nothing they win is likely to have much of a material impact on who they are or what they do. MS winning a million dollars in court is like you finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk - it might perk up your morning a bit, but it's not going to change your life. Spammers paying out millions, though - that'll wreck your whole day if you're in the spam business...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
For all the Microsoft naysayers out there, could we pause one little moment here? Before we trash everything Microsoft does as being downright evil with secret motives, it might be nice to consider that perhaps Microsoft IS doing something decent. After all, Bill Gates is undeniably a good guy when it comes to charity (I hope most people would be without that kind of money, but he does do a LOT of stuff with it). And he has been known to do a good amount of anti-spam work with Congress. Could it be possible that their 120 suits against spammers are actually at least slightly altruistic in purpose?
I'm not saying not to hold a little suspicion - they are Microsoft, but then again, don't discount them just because they are Microsoft. Instead of trying to make better anti-spam software (which they are also doing), they are throwing a lot of money at the root of the cause, both in Congressional lobbying and these suits. Doesn't seem too bad to me.
Aaron
basically no direct benefit to them
Are you kidding? I'm sure there is a huge benefit to them in the cost of running Hotmail. Hotmail accounts would be send millions of spam a day.
Waking Up - There must be a better way to start the day.
Spyware and malware is partly their fault. If they really want to clean up their own image, apologize and take on the jerks who cause so much frustration. This stuff is killing productivity, costs millions, and drives people crazy.
Spam's got nothing on spyware.
KKK rallies are allowed to romp through cities
But they're not allowed to come into people's houses and harrass them. Not if they don't want to be charged with trespassing and breaking & entering--and that's assuming the house owner's shotgun doesn't do them in first (assuming the state has sane home defence laws). That's the difference.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
So if hell froze over does that mean everything I said about "...when hell freezes over" came true? Uh-oh.
Uh-oh??? Are you kidding? There are some girls I need to call right now!
It will not do anything to stop the spead of spam, and this is why:
These 120 spammers represent a very small section of the entire spammer population, and I doubt that they've got big guys like Ralsky on it. You won't see M$ getting anywhere near the spam gangs, either. In fact, when you think about it, M$ is the reason some spam gangs even exist! Think about all the security holes in XP that allow it to be hijacked and used as a spam relay. Also, think about the "open-relay-by-default" nature of some M$ mailserver products. Maybe these lawsuits are Microsoft's way of saying "Our bad!"
Given the difficulty/cost of tracking down spammers and nailing them, I think it will just turn spamming into a different industry. The (smart) spammers will just go farther underground and become more sophisticated in their ways of avoiding detection/liability. These 120 guys were probably just amateurs that didn't know what they were doing anyway.
I'm saying this very seriously. They probably run the world's busiest email domain, and get a shitload of spam. If they cooperated with the community, via dcc, or even just by publishing their own blocklist -- other ISPs could start using that list tomorrow to kill pretty much all spam sources.
But Microsoft don't share, I don't buy this bull about how MS is trying to end spam. It would take 2 of their engineers and one week to set up a very effective blocklist just based on the garbage being thrown at hotmail all the time. Then the world would know about virtually all spam sources.
There used to be a time where we all actually opened emails from strangers in other countries.
E.g., when I wrote that walkthrough of mine and put my real email address in it (again, spam was not yet a problem), it never occured to me that I'd ever want to discriminate against, say, gamers from Korea if they have questions.
E.g., when I posted on newsgroups, I actually expected that some people would answer privately per email. No point in dragging the whole thread off-topic, after all. Some of them were, yes, in other countries. If I was talking about Linux or about 3D programming in assembly, I wasn't going to reject potentially valuable information from someone just because their email info is from Elbonia.
The fact that nowadays email addresses are some jealously guarded family secret, and that we're gladly blocking whole countries or continents, is the effect of spam that I hate the most. It just shows the extent of the damage these fucks have done to this public resource.
So, well, in fact I actually aggree to your point of view. Let them flee if they want to. Then we can block just the countries which still encourage them, and maybe reclaim our communication resource to the rest of them. Having a usable communication channel even to just half the world, is better than what we have today.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
In Redmond only old people sue spammers.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
99% of people have never heard of gmail. *everyone* knows what hotmail is.