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Texas Goes After Student Spammer
A number of people wrote in with this story: "Count Texas in the growing list of states fighting spammers with CAN-SPAM. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed the lawsuits today, charging a University of Texas student (and a cohort in California) with sending out millions of unsolicited commercial emails under the pseudonyms PayPerAction and Leadplex, among others. Spamhaus rates PayPerAction the #4 spammers in the world."
They still have the death penalty in Texas, right?
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
The answer seems simple; get politicians' email addresses on spammers' lists. Once they feel our pain, they'll do something.
Probably something stupid.
I'd like to know what this kid's major was.
Obviously Business with an Ethics concentration.
"According to watchdog group SpamHaus, PayPerAction is the fourth-largest spam operation in the world."
Only fourth? The boy can't be a native Texan, then. Must be a Yankee immigrant.
(If you can't tell the difference between humor, flamebait, and troll, don't mod this.)
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
do you see the irony that this guy really may end up having to pay per action?
His major? Saw in the Dallas Morning News it was Philosophy. There's a sad joke somewhere in there.
Ah, another "we can't do more than one thing at a time" post. If we can seek to defend trees and whales and hungry people (and anything else "in decline," as you put it), all at the same time, why is defending the uncluttered use of the internet not viable? The rapid exchange of information, un-bogged-down by crap like spam, is a vital part of the productivity and efficiency that allows us the free time and resources to take care of "things in decline."
Look! I'm typing, drinking coffee, watching news about landing on Titan, reading slashdot, petting my dog, and using the internet instead of burning gas driving to an office all at the same time. Wreck the net, and I'm back on the road.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Well, they figure if you don't want Viagra then you may be interested in their other products such as v14gr4 or V.!agri.a or ^i4.r4. Don't forget Cialias or C14l1$ or !4l1s soft tabs. My spam consists of someone advertising their porn webcam, shady pharmaceutical sales pitches, mortgages, and premium replica Rolex watches. They must think I have nothing better to do than buy a house and sit around taking viagara while jerking off to some slut's webcam and using my replica watch to alert me to when I should get up to get food.
Well, until recently spamming, in itself, has been quite legal. You could only get someone convicted, if they spammed to advertise something illegal.
Since the various anti-spamming laws have come to effect the problem has been lack of enforcement.
The only real deterrent so far has been civil suits filed by ISPs such as Microsoft (Hotmail and MSN), Earthlink and AOL to name to most active litigators of spammers. The civil suits have been very effective, but do not usually land the perps in prison (other than that Buffalo spammer who was dumb enough to use stolen credit cards to pay for the Earthlink accounts he spammed from).
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Actually, almost a third of the people on death row are white. I can't say anything about their financial status, though.
You could only get someone convicted, if they spammed to advertise something illegal.
Or of the spammer made unauthorised use of someone else's computer to send spam... No, no, you're right, spammers don't do illegal things like that.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
I wonder if the student used his student accounts and/or UT's bandwidth the propagate his spam? If so, that's a DOUBLE whammy!! The state could have his proverbial ass for misuse if they can't get him on the spam charges.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
It's been done. He lives in Deep Eddy - an trendy, expensive part of Austin in a house that is appraised at $450k (which is maximum value a house can be appraised at in that neighborhood - it actually worth quite a lot more). He also had (at least at one point) a shiny new Jag in the driveway.
And before the usual trolls roll in to claim that most of the spam is from China and whatever:
Top 10 Spammer Countries
If you're too lazy to look, the US is 1st with over 3 times the score of the 2nd place, which is indeed China.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Not in Texas, the population here is about 50% white, 35% Hispanic, 10% Black, 5% all others. In the biggest cities of Houston and San Antonio Hispanics are more than 50%.
Plus, crime statistics in the USA have been known not to follow the population ethnic mix for a long time.
You know, I don't have a problem with spammers getting nailed against the wall just like everyone else; but something just occurred to me:
...wait for it...
....now.)
Why is it when this college kid breaks a law (spam), Slashdot is ready to fire him out of a cannon, but when a different college kid breaks a different law (DMCA, DVD CSS, Apple trade secret lawsuits, insert other offense here), they rush to his defense?
I understand the whole "freedom of information" angle, but the law is still the law... until it is repealed and there is much rejoicing.
Besides, maybe this spam asshat was just trying to spread the freedom of v!agr@ and the lowest m0rtg@g3 rates!
(proceed to mod me into oblivion...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
We've known Leadplex were spammers since day one.
All these shady guys used to be walking in and out of Leadplex all day, it looked more like a drug ring than an actual business. I work over at Simpler-Webb and smoked a lot of cigarettes with the spammer guys. Most of them aren't intrinsically bad, but that Ryan guy (i'm assuming it was him) acted REALLY shady all the time. I went over to their company one day just 'looking for someone' and when he came to the door he seemed pretty freaked out someone he didnt know was coming to his office. For a while we thought it was a porn studio because they had so many fine girls going in and out of there all day, hell it might've been porn as well. Who knows. A week or so ago we say them moving a lot of boxes out, and a couple of days ago a camera crew showed up trying to get the spammers to come out and this was the first time we had ever seen the lights off in their office. Definetly shady stuff, hard to believe we work DIRECTLY across the hall from the worlds #4 spammers.
All in all, glad to see these guys getting put away, I need less spam in my mailbox for sure.
~~par