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Spammer Scott Levine Convicted
bani writes "Spammer Scott Levine was convicted of massive data theft from Acxiom Corporation. Prosecutors say his company, the now-defunct Snipermail.com, stole 1.6 billion customer records from Acxiom and sold the data. He faces a maximum of 640 years in prison under the law, though he will likely be sentenced to far less. One spammer down, several million to go?"
I think its safe to say he won't be serving that long, one way or another.
Only give him 1/10th of the maximum.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Meanwhile, back in the States, murders and rapists are given 5-10 year terms and are out in 3...
i'm pretty sure noone has ever had to serve more than around 200 years in prison
They should put him in prison and make him write out every e-mail he ever sent with a pencil and paper. He gets out of jail whenever he is finished.
From TFA:
"We're very pleased with the outcome. We think it's the appropriate verdict," U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins said outside U.S. District Court.
As much as I dislike spammers, is 640 years appropriate for one man? He didn't even kill anyone. Maybe he should have gotten something more brutal, like 64000 hours of community service...as a tech support operator!
There are individuals sentenced to [jail] terms far exceeding the time they are expected to be alive.
Does the state keep their bodies once they die in jail in order to meet the terms of the sentence?
Every spammer that goes to jail for his actions is a victory. For one, it's quite well-known that most of the spam we see today originates from a relatively small group of people, so it's not exactly "one down, several more million to go"; and also, even if there were considerably more, the mere fact that they now know that they might go to jail for spamming just might be a deterrent. Spamming is pretty much a textbook example of whitecollar crime, and it's been shown that unlike with bluecollar crime (that is, more physical crimes, like assault, rape, robbery etc.), prison sentences actually do serve as a deterrent here.
Remember, spammers are cowards - and greedy cowards, for that matter. They do what they do to get rich quick, so the prospect losing their money in lawsuits and possibly going to jail afterwards will scare them quite a bit.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
What is it with computing and the number 640?
"You are hereby sentenced to 640 years in jail, with parole in nine months"
ah, the law is an ass..
The thought of him getting sentanced to a prison term gives me warm fuzzies, knowing there is a strong chance he will experiance the longest night of his life.
He faces a maximum of 640 years in prison under the law, though he will likely be sentenced to far less.
250 years?
According to the ROKSO list there's only really a hundred or so Levines and Richters out there. They are collectively responsible for a huge percentage of all the spam though. The rest is sent by amateur spammers sending to a few tens of thousands of people. The real spammers on the ROKSO list have databases of 1 billion + addresses.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
maybe they should sentence him to reading every single one of his spam mails out loud to himself
I wonder if Scott Levine is related in anyway to Ted Levine of Silence(Buffalo Bill) of the Lambs...
At first I thought the article title was referring to Levin, the founder of IRC network Freenode. He spams a lot too - he's constantly making wallop messages begging for cash to support the network because his lazy ass can't get a job.
Ron dies in chapter 9 of book 7.
"640 years should be enough for anyone"
He was convicted of stealing data. Then he sold that stolen data. All his customers should be also charged, for buying stolen data.
There are two to tango: spammers can work only with the support of their customers.
Unless it happens to a spammer.
Yes, global karmic payback can be a bitch. Have a nice life, future goatse.
Well, if the dude ripped 1.6 bn customer records, what will it cost to verify, update, and restore those records?
C|N>K
Although most of us would be hesitant to say this, in -this- situation (as it's not a warez bust), what he did wasn't theft - he didn't delete the data from their drives after he took it - so it's something, albeit not right, other than theft. I say this because proper terminology precedes proper logic which precedes a just system.
Stealing is not exclusively defined as depriving someone else of something that belongs to them.
Most children know that stealing is taking something that does not belong to you, regardless of whether it is a copy or the original item.
Stealing has a lot to do with intent as well. If I take the wrong coat at a restaurant, I deprived it from someone else, but I didn't have the intent to do so, so it isn't stealing.
Besides, even by your deifinition, it IS stealing. The records were private, once they were copied, the company was deprived of its secrecy/privacy of those records. Same as stealing a password.
-David
1. A good start.
2. Not nearly enough.
3. What's wrong with a firing squad?
4. You mean those Pen1s En1argement Pi11s don't work???
The problem is, that most spammers are seen in the 'industry' (so to speak) as some of the best paid, their earnings from the illegal mailings dwarf what some porn websites make in a day, and that can be huge
As long as their is money in it, people will try their hardest to do it. It will be very hard to stop in the end, as for every spammer who goes down... 10 new kids with a copy of a mailing script pop up.
What would be better is taking down the companies who fund the illegal mail by paying comissions on the products advertised, no spammer would risk jail if they weren't getting paid.
Business Voyeur
If it's not Consolidated Lint it's just fuzz!
He didn't? Let's assume (conservatively), that he sent out one spam per customer record he stole. 1.6 billion spams. Let's further assume that it takes a human being one second to "Just Hit Delete". 1.6 billion person-seconds wasted. 444,444 person-hours wasted. 18,518 person-days wasted. 50 person-years if you're working 24/7. At 8 hours a day, that's the entire productive lifespan of three people. Three lives - stolen just as effectively as if he'd killed them.
> Maybe he should have gotten something more brutal, like 64000 hours of community service...as a tech support operator!
64,000 hours, at 8 hours a day, is 40000 days, or 218 years, so you're not too far off the 640-year mark.
640 years ought to be enough for anybody, but what I'd really like to see is to have him locked in a cell, "Just Hitting Delete", once for every spam he sent, for 16 waking hours a day.
Four or five times a day, an email with a From: line like "Your Warden", "Health Services", or "Cafeteria" with a Subject: line such as "Extended recreation hours!", "Take a break!", or "Lunchtime!" will appear.
He has to reply to this mail to get an hour of exercise, have his medical checkups, or his meals.
Hey, it's just spam, right? Doesn't hurt anyone, right? Just delete it, right? Well, if he hasn't starved to death when he runs out of 1.6 billion spams on which to Just Hit Delete, he can walk away a free man.
So Acxiom lost 1.6 billion private records... what were they charged with for such shoddy security?
How much did they pay consumers for not protecting their data..?
What new standards did they have to agree to with the government..?
It's great to see a spammer taken down. But what about this Axciom company? According to the article, Axciom "serves large corporations by collecting and managing information for marketing purposes". Maybe they don't spam directly, but it sure sounds like they at least help spammers. And probably not just email spammers, but telephone and snail mail, as well. And apparently they're storing "personal customer records, including names, postal and e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers." [ephasis mine] Why does one company have so much information on so many people? And why when they are negligent with that data, do they not face any consequences?
The article seemed to imply that the snipermail spammers initially got access to more records than they were supposed to have because of something Axciom did (this isn't clear) before they started breaking passwords to get even more data. Where are the 600+ year prison terms for the Axciom management?
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
"640 years ought to be enough for anyone."
I don't get it.
From what i can tell, he is being jailed for THEFT, not spam.
While i agree with most here that spam sux, there is a difference between being convicted of spamming and convicted of being a common thief.
So dont get too happy yet shouting 'spammers are toast'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"One spammer down, several million to go?"
According to spamhaus only about 200 individuals are responsible for nearly all the spam in the world. I know that seems incredible but they are in a position to know.
.
Prosecutors say his company, the now-defunct Snipermail.com, stole 1.6 billion customer record
Any ideas how many unique customers whould that mean ?
So what will happen with this guy in jail? I can just see the conversation-
Scott: I'm new here
Inmate #1: I'm in armed robbery. Motherfuckers locked me up for 12 god damn years. Can you believe that shit?
Inmate #2: I'm in for not paying child support for 8 years, and not paying taxes. I have to serve two years. Can you believe what the bitch did to me, the father of her kids? Inmate #3: I'm in because the bitch said I raped her. She was all "yes, yes, yes". Bitch set me up. Can you believe this shit? Hey, Scott, what are you in for?
Scott: I got 640 years. I sent out millions of emails offering people a breakthrough product that enlarges penis size.
Inmates #1, #2, and #3 (all together): Aaa... yay. We gonna get along just fine.
Inmate #2 talking to Inmate #3: You hold his head in the toilet while I prop his ass up.
Inmate #1: You gonna forget about me? What does a brother have to do to get some props. Gimme a piece of that creamy white ass.
Scott (heard through the bubbles comming out of the toilet water: Oh, shit!
I don't want to defend spammers. But did society make a toy (computers) that can no cause massive harm to many people (spam), and society did not make any safegaurds. Look at script kiddes. Download and run, it takes no brains. I hate to say it, but people are very stupid. And if you get a stupid person that is desperate, they just might become a spammer. Who wants to spend out their whole life in a 2 bedroom trailer home in a crappy area with savages? The lure to riches can be hard to resist.
And how do we sentance a wrong do'er? Do we sentance based on each act, that every single peice of email is a seperate offense? Or do we sentance based on the whole of what he did? For example, if someone rapes one person, that is very different than if someone rapes 10 people. But what about spam?
I think if they made a BIG example out of him, took away all his money, sent him to prision for 2 years, and humiliated him, that would be a detterent. Look at Martha Stewart. How much money did she steal? I would like to compare numbers in terms of monitary loss.
I wonder if there is a way to change email, so before any email is passed on, there is some visual confermation that has to be entered by the sender. Kinda like joining a forum. Hopefully that will stop the mass emails.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Watch this.
OMG A NEW LINE!!!!
OMG I DID IT AGAIN!!!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
"One spammer down, several million to go?"
I heard that less than 200 people account for about 95% of all spam.
How about this one:
(x) You're a douchebag. Even if you formatted that properly, it still wouldn't have been funny.
In the federal system, the Bureau of Prisons turns over the corpse to the family for interrment according to their wishes. Upon death their responsibility to incarcerate you ends. Same deal in the state systems, but different mechanics.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Well, I lose several minutes a day by having to use crappy, broken Microsoft products at work. Some days a couple hours. If I'm average, couple minutes a day times the number of MS users should but Bill away for a loooong time!
/. cool.
Posted anonymously, I don't like MS because of the crappy products, not because it is
PS. Isn't 64,000 hours divided by 8 hours/day more like 8,000 days (~22 years)? Not 40,000 days.
Hey iconoclast, every time I look out there all I see is blood and bodies, raving evangelical right wing loonies, war pimps, fat greedy monsters, control-freak technological ignorati, smug grinning liars, thieves and snakeoil sellers.
;)
Exactly the riff-raff and human ditritus I always hoped would stay out of my 'digital world', which is somewhat what this story is about.
Please - Don't even open the window, nevermind the door.
Come in here and play. All we do is throw a few harmless network packets at each other, but if you don't like the ambience don't let the door hit your ass on the way out
btw I had a peep yesterday, Iran and Venezeula getting very interesting, and still an ever growing pile of bodies in Iraq, it's disgusting what fails to make our mainstream media.
hmmmm.
<i>640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer</I>
640 years is all the punishment anybody would ever need for computer spaming.
somebody has a sense of humor.
They should hand out these kinds of punishments to murderers, child molesters and rapists.
I want everyone to say this please.
Once everyone hears this the typical life span will be expanded byond 1 thousand years and then medical science will dubble the maxamum life span once every 6 months.
640 years is more sentence than anyone ever needs.
I don't actually exist.
I wonder if he would start over again?
It's the humor thread, dipstick asshole. And yes, I did italicize asshole for added comic effect.
I found the grandfathers post funny. Nothing better than gang rape in a prision for a few chuckles. Don't you know why we send so many black people to jail? Well, to get them off the street. But also to terrorize the white people we lock up. It is a deterrent against misusing intellect.
"but what I'd really like to see is to have him locked in a cell, "Just Hitting Delete", once for every spam he sent, for 16 waking hours a day.
[...]
He has to reply to this mail to get an hour of exercise, have his medical checkups, or his meals."
I just have to say, I think this is brilliant! You could make it even more realistic by having a few important messages hidden in the bunch, containing a code he needs to gain access to the meal etc. This way he has to read the spam just to be sure it's not an important message. Such a fitting revenge.
...Information just wants to be free. He didn't steal the information, he just copied it and shared it.
Hey, it's not like he defrauded people of $11 billion dollars or something.
You could make it even more realistic by having a few important messages hidden in the bunch, containing a code he needs to gain access to the meal etc.
Go back and read the second paragraph that you quoted. That was exactly his idea.
In my opinion, The problem with spam isn't the time it takes up. The basic issue is it's extremely rude. The first time someone sent a spam, he was punished. I complained to the ISP of the sender when I was receiving one spam every few months.
They're using a resource that I provide for communication with friends and trying to sell me something. It's just extrmely bad manners.
I wonder if there is a way to change email, so before any email is passed on, there is some visual confermation that has to be entered by the sender.
Then the League for the Blind presses charges, you go to jail for violating the Rehabilitation Act and/or the Americans with Disabilities Act (or foreign counterparts), and once you're in prison, you get sexually assaulted by a blind man.
He's lucky it wasn't 826 years!
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
Spam used to be a big problem for me until I stopped using Outlook and started using Thunderbird. Dealing with spam used to take minutes, now only seconds. Really, just about 10-30 seconds to identify the bad mail that Thunderbird's filter didn't catch.
Is it not the same for you?
I'm not defending, or apologizing for this guy. I'm just saying that you seem to be making a very big deal about something that, for most of us, isn't taking more than a minute a day to deal with.
By your sentencing formula, shouldn't hackers, virus writers and script kiddies be getting a lot more time than they are now? I mean, how many productivity hours are lost every year due to a virus?
I empathize with you. I'll never forgive George Lucas for the two hours of my life wasted watching SWI.
damaged by dogma
Excellent post (my reaction was that you deserve your low UID). Just be careful that you don't stray into RIAA math. For instance, how many people manually delete spam anymore? How does it differ from dozens of other forms of ads that are considered ok?
But,as you point out, with the volume these spammers do it adds up really quickly. They do some real damage, a little bit at a time (there's a use for integral calculus for you). I hope they throw away the key.
So the difference here is that one person has the ability to disturb the whole infrastructure fo the economy, and waste a lot of time and money.
As bad as they are, a violent criminal only disturbs a small segment of society.
So a data 'thief' is like a lawn mower and a violent criminal is like an ant eater.
Hello Cruel World
"He faces a maximum of 640 years in prison under the law"
Uhh.. you really think?!
"Stealing is not exclusively defined as depriving someone else of something that belongs to them."
OK, quote some laws then, because that opinion looks a lot like bullshit to me.
For example, the Theft Act 1968:
"A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and 'thief' and 'steal' shall be construed accordingly."
This is vigilanteism, which most of you supposedly claim to be against.
Yeah, fine and punish a spammer, great, but sorry, 640 years is OVERKILL and you know it.
Hell, ANY jail time for spamming is extreme. The purpose of jail is to isolate those who are a THREAT to society. Someone sending massive amounts of email to people is not a threat to society no matter how you look at it.
We often overlook and take for granted what the purpose of prison is, and it certainly isn't a place to send a fuckin SPAMMER, no matter how much it annoys YOU.
When you do your janky math and figure "oh it takes 5 seconds to delete an email, multiply that by a billion and blah blah you lose millions across the country!!", it makes it look worse than it really is.
I'm sure SOME money is lost.. so do the logical thing - fine him a good portion (75%+) of his assets.
I hate spam as much as the next person, but this mob mentality is sickening.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
"OK, quote some laws then, because that opinion looks a lot like bullshit to me."
You're losing your way by -- as many, many Slashdotters do -- ignoring colloquial use and making the assumption that a law book is the only valid source here. This argument falls down when you think of all the other colloquialisms that are out there: for example, no lawbook will contain the phrase "kiddy porn" but we all know what it means.
English is a great, big, colorful language. We have "stolen kisses," "stealing your thunder," "theft of service" (as in cable or satellite TV), "stealing third base" (a baseball term), to "steal the show", to "steal away", "that item was a real steal" (as in bargain) and countless other examples that would set the "something must be permanently deprived!" Slashdot crowd into a frantic buzz.
If you're using Firefox, you can type "dict steal" into the address bar for more information.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
64,000 hours, at 8 hours a day, is 40000 days, or 218 years, so you're not too far off the 640-year mark.
Your numbers are off. 64,000 hours at 16 hours a day is 4,000 days, or 11 years. That's a reasonable sentence. The work could be laying bricks in Siberia or digging irrigation ditches in the Sahara. Five minute water/food break at lunchtime. Perhaps a toilet break mid-afternoon.
Yes, it's true for lots of people. There's a catch, though. Sometimes one "ham" mail gets misclassified as spam. You should always make a quick check to make sure that you have no false possitives. That somehow defeats the purpose of the filter.
GPG 0x1B479C78
and economic punishment for economic crime. The punishment should fit the crime.
Rape, murder, and other violent crimes should be punished with physical sentences - i.e. prison sentences.
Economic or "white-collar" crime should be punished by economic means - heavy fines, restrictions on work etc.
Also, we are entering some dangerous territory when we punish people for "wasted economic effort", such as when deleting spam. If we are punishing people for wasting other people's time, most of Slashdot would be facing 25yrs to life!
This might just fall into the category of cruel and unusual punishment...
"640 years should be enough for everyone." -Anon :)
Can we get his cellmate's names and addresses? I would like to send his cellmate's some penis enlargment pills and cialis softtabs.
Fight Spammers!
640 years ought to be enough for anybody
I think I love you.
---- Watch out for snakes!
From TFAs:
"There is no evidence that any individuals are at risk of harm due to the breaches," the company said. "It is also important to note that only one external server was accessed, and there was no intrusion of Acxiom's internal security firewalls or internal databases."
"The 1.6 billion records included names, home addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers"
HAhaahahhahhahhaahahahaha. Yeah. what an excuse, no internal server was breached. And WTF was an "external" server doing containing all that information without any firewalls? Was thier security totally incompetent?
As this thread is about the punishment of a criminal, then yes, a law book is the only valid source here. Or should people be sentenced to prison terms because they stole kisses?
Sorry if you actually support free speech you have to support this guy.
You don't need to listen him.
droopy has made some good points. look at the sentences handed out to a lot of corporate criminals...they often get fines or white collar "holiday" prison stays...and that's for stealing huge sums of money from retirees or the economy in general.
and they usually get to keep their money.
flamebait?
If he really stole all those customer's data, Did he make enough money out of it? Can his kids and grand kids thank him for his sacrifice? Or Does he go in a pauper?
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
The salient point is that any time lost to spam is too much. Spam is trespass and theft of services. It eats my time, my CPU, my bandwidth and my diskspace (because I have to be able to recover from false positives). Even with your optimistic time projections, the loss is non-zero. So you're arguing that theft is OK, provided it falls below some threshold. Provided that threshold is 0.0, I'd agree.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
In legal matters, the precise definition of stealing DOES matter.
Allowing people to get away with using the word "stealing" for non-stealing things is at least as bad as letting them get away with poisonous phrases like "intellectual property".
Certain words have emotional connotations, and allowing the pro-information-restrictions people to frame the terms of the debate in their emotionally laden words is letting them win.
I didn't miss anything, I just don't believe that you - or the original poster - really need 1 minute per spam mail you get, but if you do, you're doing something wrong. Or maybe you're ... thinking ... very ... slow, if mental context switching takes that long for you, I don't know.
And like I said earlier, I'm certainly not defending him, all I'm trying is to inch towards a reasonable estimation of the damages. And the original posters estimation was just way off - or at least badly reasoned. I don't want to get into any debate whether spamming can or should be considered theft.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
"640 years ought to be enough for anybody..."
640 years ought to be enough jail time for anybody.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
640 years reading the 640.000.000+ spams he sent on a 640x480 computer screen on an old computer of only 640k of memory... Hmmm TASTY !
For example, do you really think the point of giving Bernard Ebbers 25 years in jail was to protect society from that evil man. Is Judith Miller behind bars so she won't go on a crime spree? Is Martha Stewart under house arrest for OUR protection? Okay, bad example, but you get my point: jail is not just a punishment.
I do feel bad for Scott Levine because his punishment will be Draconian, but he knew the risks before he commited the act. US-based spammers were playing russian roulette with the US government and Scott lost. Better luck next time. Maybe when he gets out, he can go hang out with Mitnik. I'm sure they will have something in common.
I was talking with a friend of mine who runs a mortgage brokering business. He does NOT advertise online, he mostly does it by word of mouth and trade shows (especially the bridal ones, people getting married seem to be in the house market more often than not).
Each client earns him a little over $1000 US on average (I hadn't realized it was so much, I always assumed it was a few hundred), in other words each person he closes a mortgage with is worth quite a bit of money. This means that for a spam run of say a few tens of million addresses if he were to get two or more responses that developed into sales he would turn a profit after paying for the spam. If he developed five or ten customers due to massive spamming he'd be making an extra couple of grand (not bad).
Until the economics of such activities change we will have spam. It's a brutally cost-effective method of advertising (that happens to annoy the hell out of everyone).
Also it takes considerably less time than 1 second to delete spam, and adding to that spam filters probably blocked a large portion of that spam.
the outcome is bullshit. the real outcome should have been a fine for Acxiom, $5 for every record stolen.
from TFCWS (the fucking companies website):
In the Acxiom case, the unauthorized access occurred as information was being exchanged between Acxiom and some of our clients via one external File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, a common method in which companies exchange data via the Internet. Not all Acxiom clients nor all clients using this FTP server were affected, and only a small portion of all the information Acxiom processes for our clients was accessed. No breach of Acxiom's corporate security firewall occurred.
The files that were accessed contained a wide variety of client information, some of which was personally identifiable and some of which was not. Most of the data was non-sensitive, and some of the data was encrypted.
Because the information belongs to Acxiom's clients, we are not authorized to answer questions from individuals about whether their information was accessed in the breach.
Spammers annoy the hell out of people, and do a lot more harm than drug dealers. If a drug dealer selling Marijuana can get life in prison, the spammer should get life in prison too.
Selling personal information is a lot worse than selling any drug.
You do know there are multiple laws that cover theft right?
Take identity theft, where no tangible property is deprived from the victim, however there was a act passed by Congress in 1998 called the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act which states that it is a federal crime when anyone:
"...knowingly transfers or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit, or to aid or abet, any unlawful activity that constitutes a violation of Federal law, or that constitutes a felony under any applicable State or local law."
So by this act's definition, I would say that this is clearly a case of stealing information.
You can read more here:
http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/federallaws.html
-David
If someone can get life for minor physical crimes, like selling illegal plants and chemicals, why not give a spammer life? Why not have a war on spam? Moe of us are against the spam than against the drugs.
How many of us like spam? how many of us like our personal information being sold? NONE OF US. We all want the spammer to get life in prison, why? Because when you sell someones information, its a personal offense. It is more personal than selling a plant, it is more personal than selling a gun, why? All of that information combined can be as dangerous as a gun. This guy was selling information to who? Terrorists? serial killers? hitmen? who? Most likely some unknown nameless group of guys, which makes it even worse.
If someone rapes a person this is life in prison, if someone rapes a millon people, this is life in prison, if someone steals your personal information and sells it, this is life in prison.
Who is to stop your rich enemies from buying that information to bribe and blackmail you? Who is to stop them from using this information to attack you?
Although mathematically he "took away" the working lives of three people, when you think about the amount of things that we spend one second on, one second gone from your life generally isn't something that's going to be missed very much. It would be kinda the same thing as if I stole a penny from 1.6 billion people. Collectively, I did a lot of damage, however, the amount of damage I really did was next to nothing. Think of it, if any person added up all the times they hurt someone physically over their lifetime, one could make a case that the cumulative damages would be akin to murder. Making his sentence based totally on the cumulative damages is ridiculous. He should be punished, no doubt about it. But let's put things in perspective. Murderers get less time than that.
If you are a capitalist, then you'd know that corporations are more valueable than people. Profit is more valueable than life, and in this case loss of money is worse than loss of life. Rape is actually less damaging than spam. How many corporations are harmed by spammers? Perhaps thousands. How many individuals are harmed by spammers? Perhaps millions. How much money is lost? how many people might get blackmailed? bribed, or attacked with this information sold by the spammer?
Spam is very bad on a wide scale, rape is very bad on an individual scale. Both are wrong. If you steal and sell peoples information, this is virtual rape, its not as bad as actual rape but its not much better. Millions of virtual rapes vs 1 rape? Yeah this guy raped millions. Physical rape to millions is worse than virtual rape if you are a communist. If you are a capitalist, then the individual does not matter, only the corporation matters, only the CEO matters, only your boss matters. Only profits matter.
Bill Gates, Sr., Esq.
I'm annoyed by spam myself, but I see this kind of idiotic reasoning all the time by people whose reason is blinded by their annoyance.
If we follow your reasoning, anyone who wastes someone else's time should be convicted for murder divided by the percentage of a lifetime the victims (people whose time was wasted) spent being annoyed.
There are plenty of ways to fight spam, from content-based filtering to decentralized trust systems -- but making it a capital offense to annoy too many people is not one of the most thoughtful ones.
From LectLaw URL (emphasis added):
In short, if he was in fact sentenced to 640 years he would remain in prison until his life naturally expired. Or at least as naturally as one's life can expire in a concrete cage.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
By your logic we could put people in away for life for a bad TV commericial.
Where's a Russian with a club when you need one?
Information crimes are new, in that a person is capable of doing it to the entire human race at the same time. Never before has one jerk had such global reach.
So don't compare one spam deletion to one murder. Compare hundreds of millions of spam deletions to one murder.
Now add in the extra carpal tunnel syndrome that happened just because of him. Think of the blood pressure of people aggravated by the nuissance. Think of the servers and gateways that crashed because of him. Think of all the trojans and viruses that rode piggy-back on the spam he sent, with or without his knowing.
I say when your victim pool involves your entire species, when people in every nation on Earth got the displeasure of dealing with your handiwork, that your punishment be more stiffly considered than on the grounds of how severe the crime was to the individual victim.
What did they mean exactly by customer records? I am in doubt a little that any company may have a 1 600 000 000 customers, that's 1/4 part of the planet's population, isn't it?
Years ago the IBM PC (and compatible computers) could address 640 kilobytes of memory. After the IBM PC itself was surpassed by others, those others were designed to be compatible with it. They had more memory, and various hacks to make that memory available to programs, but for certain purposes you needed memory that was available without those hacks. Thus, you would hear people talking about the "lower 640" as a precious resource to be conserved. Around the mid 90's, if I recall correctly, the 640K limit became irrelevant, and these days a lot of younger people may have never heard of it.
There's also the fact that Bill Gates once said something like "640K should be enough for anybody." It was probably true when he said it, but it sounds funnier and funnier with each passing year.
Spam is a part of email, just as unsolicited phone calls and junk mail are part of their respective technologies. As long as we have email (as it exists today), we will have spam. The two are inseparable. As you have already observed handling spam takes time. To completely rid yourself of spam, you'll need to use something other than email (or you'll need to change significantly change what email is).
Spam is not trespass nor is it theft of services. It is an unwanted part of a new technology. If email and spam were not a more productive use of your time than other existing technologies then you wouldn't use it. The productivity lost to spam is more than made up by the productivity gained through the use of email over other technologies.
Charles K. Clarkson
Many people truly want to help. Unfortunately, many people truly suck at it.
Email is not equivalent, because I have no workable means to
- Inform potential mailers of my acceptable use policy
- Reliably identify offenders for further action
Spammers using my mail facilities against my explicit permission is trespass. The resulting expension of resources is theft of service.Yeah, another apologist.Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
The phone network and the postal service are also very mature products. Phones have been around more than 100 years. Private correspondence in America was delivered as far back as the early 1600's. You cannot expect the same level of innovations in email as you do from mail and phone.
The DO Not Call list is a very recent addition to phone service and does not restrict all unsolicited calls. Just calls from organizations which do not posses the political clout to be exempt from that list.
The USPS has special rates for bulk mail senders. I can send bulk post card mailings as low as 9 cents each and get it to everyone on the route. The USPS has always maintained special pricing to encourage bulk mailers, like junk mail.
This shows their maturity as an industry, these features were not available when these industries were young. Look at how long phone service existed before caller ID was common. Email has existed for only a small fraction of that time.
As I said earlier, to be fair, you should compare the time spent on email/spam to the time spent on alternative technologies. There is no email technology available which has no spam. So you are unable to select that product for the comparison.
Charles K. Clarkson
Many people truly want to help. Unfortunately, many people truly suck at it.
"Fine, if you wanna put him in prison, make it minimum security where they can come and go as they please and have jobs around the local city."
You can put them in whatever kind of prison if you want, as long as they are dropped without a parachute into the cell from 1000 km up in the air.
"I sure hope people at least are open minded enough to realize there are other alternatives,""
Seriously, your alternative is a pretty bad one: you let them out of prison during the day so they can spam some more "as they please".
Ya thats horrible, unlike all the methods of communication that don't have people trying to sell you something. GET A FUCKING CLUE.
Ya thats horrible
No. It's not horrible. It's irritating.
It's simply rude and there's no way to stop it.
unlike all the methods of communication that don't have people trying to sell you something.
Other means of people trying to sell to me helps to support a service, so I'm happy to tolerate it.
GET A FUCKING CLUE.
Wow! You can swear. And type in capitals. Does that make you feel big? Like a strong, powerful man. I hope so, because I'm sorry to say it makes you look like an uneducated brat.
Thats pretty weak logic. Spam supports a service, maybe not a service you like, but it supports a service. Spam supports that 'free' porn site you put your email on. Spam supports the no-name 'drug' industry. Spam supports the nation of Nigeria. Hating spam is racist, I'm sorry if the lives of an entire nation arn't with clicking delete for you.
Spam does not support the no-name drug industry. It's a cost. None of the spam I receive supports free porn services because I've never signed up to one.
Spam supports the nation of Nigeria. Hating spam is racist
You're the racist! You clearly think that the only possible way for Nigeria to have any success is through crime. Let me tell you, I know a lot of africans, and they are all very capable of earning a living through legal practices.