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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?"
Out of curiosity, why is Microsoft bothering to litigate?
Surely, the amount of money they spend doing this outweighs the "brownie points" they'll be winning.
And, why wouldn't they just focus on writing anti-spam filtering software, and then _sell_ it as a solution to the spam problem? (In that light, shouldn't they be _encouraging_ more spammers so that they can sell more anti-spam software, or perhaps better convince people to switch to an "enhanced" Outlook 200x?)
Microsoft can lobby lawmakers to make sure that doesn't happen. Can anyone say... spam patent?
Of course, no matter how much they spend, we'll probably always be seeing viagra spam in our hotmail boxes. Perhaps in addition to this set of lawsuits (which benefit everybody, don't get me wrong), they should throw in a campaign to work on giving the Hotmail spam filters an overhaul. It might help the community a great deal if Microsoft were to push some of their development over to spam filtering, as well as integrating some of the better email authentication systems into Hotmail, Outlook and the like.
Are there any published studies about how much spam could be reduced if Microsoft could place more effective anti-spam features into the OS itself
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a great step forward, but I think (supposing spammers aren't a little more intimidated) that we might see a better reduction in spam if better precautions were to be taken. Sorry if I've missed any big features mixed in with Windows that might help with this, I don't pay much attention to the patching that goes in as far as email is concerned.
Ryan
I don't know who to root for! I don't want Microsoft to win money from spammers, but I want to spammers to burn and die (and go broke in the process). Who should I root for? I'm so confused...
But what I wonder, is why isn't Moft going after the spyware and all that put stuff on your machine that, if you remove it, it makes your machine act funky? Isn't that damaging their product, IE?, or sometimes even Windblows itself is messed up.
Spam is a nuisance, but the adware and spyware are, imho, what are the biggest threat to people's computers. Of course, far be it from me to complain, because I make a liiiiittle on the side cleaning up machines over and over and over a freaking gain, but really, I think Moft should go out and start nailing some of these folks hard.
(btw, Moft means Microsoft)
That's my two cents, I expect no one to pay any attention to it, lol.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
"RIAA/MPAA is currently litigating. With RIAA/MPAA's deep pockets, can they effectively send a resounding message to pirates?"
Are there damages? Can suing spammers actually be a revenue stream for MS?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Yes, because the only possible reason in increasing storage space is to receive more spam.........
Speaking of which, here's an interesting tidbit:
I wonder if there's any relat-- Ooh! shiny!One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
let the spammers flee to south america, asia, etc. Unless you need mail from such and such a country, firewall the HELL out of it. Koreans are already learning the hard way what it means to be so heavily blocked that no one accepts their mail traffic.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Could it be that Microsoft is trying to generate some positive news for itself at a time when even the average Joe and Josephine are pissed because their Microsoft OSes are trashed after being on the net for a few hours? Or is Microsoft doing this Spam battle out of the goodness of their hearts?
Curious, but the invective hurled against Microsoft by average non-geek folks certainly has exploded recently: Seems even grandmas understand Microsoft sold them a pretty bag full of moths, metaphorically speaking.
This could make for an interesting ending of the Microsoft con: The greedy, gluttonous dragon devours its own heart and falls over dead.
Add your own happily-ever-after line here.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
...making them illegal doesn't necessarily mean people will stop doing them.
If you make spam illegal and prosecute the people sending it, you basically force businesses who respect the law out of the market, and what remains are the businesses with no respect for the law: organized criminals
The mob's next frontier is spam, and spam's next frontier is the mob. I don't think this is an improvement.
"Because of you anti spam whacko zealots who dont know how to delete an email message .. people's civil liberties are going down the tube and the govt. is hunting down people who are just trying to make a living .. freaking DEAL WITH THE GODDAMN INCONVENIENCE.
.. but they want to skin alive anyone who causes them 1 second of delay. And yes an individual email only takes up one second of your time. I understand you get lots of spam from different sources .. but how can you punish someone who's doing what a lot of others are doing .. The punishments that the spammers receive is assymetrical revenge considering that the particular individual actually only cause one or two seconds of inconvenience per victim."
.. but how can you punish someone who's doing what a lot of others are doing .."
People dont mind rapists and murderes getting away
Let's assume you're correct in saying it only takes 2 seconds per message, although I think it takes a bit more.
If we assume 1 million copies of the message are sent out and reach someone's inbox, that's 2000000 seconds, or about 555.5 hours, collectively taken by that spammer.
If we assume that all these people were making a mere $8 an hour, that's now $4444.00 that spammer has cost.
That's not very realistic, though. Let's assume that 5 million messages found their way into some inboxes, and all the people were paid $25/hour and it took them 5 seconds to delete.
5000000*5/60/60*25 == $173611.12
Now, with about 100 messages a day finding their way into the average inbox (wild guess), that's $17,361,112.00 it has cost.
Still think it's a minor inconvenience?
"I understand you get lots of spam from different sources
So because Hitler killed a shit-load of jews (yes I know, some law about the longer a usenet thread continues, the more likely a comparison to Hitler & Nazis is...) and was never punished for it (he killed himself before anyone else got to him), we should let other people attempt to kill off a race without punishing them as long as they kill themselves once they're done?
Come on, that's just weak.
ND
This statement is forty-five characters long.
We still hate Microsoft, but we like that they're suing spammers.
If two people you really don't like kill each other, you can still hate them even though they both did you a favor.
paintball
Microsoft provides DNS and mail service hosting to the large scale lottery scam. /dev/null.
Next time you receive one of these ("you have won a big price in the lottery") check the domain name you are supposed to send mail to. Usually some variation on "cashchangeukltd.com".
Do a whois on it. In 99% of cases, it has been registered by Microsoft!
The "technical contact" is an address that only sends an auto-reply tellig you another address (pdbeta@microsoft.com). That one is linked to
When you send a mail to the mentioned cashchange address, it usually returns after a few days with some "mailbox overflow" or "could not contact mailserver" reply *FROM HOTMAIL*.
So, Microsoft are fully in the position to do something with this. Yet, they ignore all abuse mail about this topic.
They don't do things for altruistic purposes.
Before we proceed, let me make the point that I agree with this statement completely. Of course, it could be applied to any corporation as well.
You ever seen a Microsoft donate sums of money and not see it prominently advertised?
That said, this is a pretty feeble argument. Suppose, for a moment, that Microsoft only publicizes 50% of the donations it makes. The other half it funnels down to worthy charities in amounts small enough and/or channels obscure enough that the general public never finds out. Would you know about those? Of course not! Claiming we only know about the publicized donations is akin to claiming a product is secure because we've fixed all the known security holes in it. Well, yes, that may be true, but it doesn't rule out the possibility that there are undiscovered or undisclosed flaws.
> We can never expcet to get rid of spam completely
I agree with you mostly.
But I have a proposition for a law which IMO will kill much spam.
How about prosecuting not just the spammers (who spam) but also the firms who BUY spam? Well, OK, we jail that poor dude who sent 1 billion spam emails advertising viagra. So what? Viagra seller (or myabe even viagra producer himself, who knows?!) will move to another spammer and the whole mess continues! But if we prosecute the advertiser as well as the spammer, they will fear paying for spam. And they are much easier to locate because their contact info is right there in the spam message!
Yes, I agree, that is very rough and has to be improved and worked on, and yes I see that this law may be a means for drowning a competitor (send a lot of spam with competitor's advertisement and he is in a jail) but nevetherless I think it's a good idea.