Slashdot Mirror
Gates' Resolve in Bringing Spammers to Justice
An anonymous reader writes "It didn't seem to me like any single company had the stomach to keep after the scum that are ruining the Net for the rest of us. Unless that company is Microsoft. Since the beginning of 2003, Microsoft has filed 96 lawsuits against spammers, and 119 lawsuits against phishers. By any measure, 215 lawsuits constitutes a legal juggernaut. "
Reducing Spam makes people use MS computers (and Exchange) more (as opposed to the alternatives).
:)
- Investing in spam filter technology reduces spam.
- Sueing spammers also reduces spam.
The optimal strategy will be to persue both strategies till they yield the same rate of spam reduction.
And that rate should be determined by whatever they think they earn on spam reduction.
My bet is that someone at MS has done the math.
And it keeps their lawyers sharp, who knows how and when that will come in handy
...probably just got tired of getting spam and 419ers in his Hotmail inbox / Outlook Express. So instead of developing better filters, he decided to take them out.
Someone might as well invite BillG to Gmail already.
Can Slashdot ever accept the fact that Microsoft can do some good? I'd be willing to bet that 30% of the comments on this article will be "OMG MICRO$OFT IS GOOD?!". Accept the fact that they really can do good things and shut with the Microsoft bashing.
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You may be talking about this:
He's still got time, then.
Don't run Windows under an administrative context and that wouldn't happen. It'd be the same thing as letting your kids go browsing for a couple hours under root and when you come back you find you have dancing bonzai buddies all over your desktop and some mysterious new daemon called "Keyword search helper"-- and if Linux ever achieves a large desktop share, don't think that those type of programs won't be created.
The IETF standard for crypto-signed email headers was substantially derailed by Microsoft not wanting to 'play nicely' with the extremely large proportion of the email servers out there that run on open source.
So, Microsoft imposed licensing requirements that the open source community couldn't meet. Yeah, to that extent, I blame Microsoft. That's not an Open Source failure, it's a deliberate licensing decision by Microsoft to write the license that way; even after it was clear what the effect would be- ultimately to help spammers.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
/. where no Microsoft action (good or bad) goes unpunished.
If they sued them, people would yell David and Goliath. If they let them go, people say they're not helping the community.
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By any measure, 215 lawsuits constitutes a legal juggernaut.
I guess you've never heard of a little group known as the RIAA.