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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?"
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.
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!
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.
You can't really be that stupid, can you?
If you're being serious: Say one guys kills 10 people, and they give him 10 life sentences. That way, if one is reversed, he's still in there for 9 others. A way to make sure they're in there their whole lives. If you're joking: They shock them over and over to keep them technically alive until the time is up.
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..
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"
Naw, confirms my belief that spammers are bloodsucking vampires. Should just put a wooden stake through his heart.
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
Unless it happens to a spammer.
Yes, global karmic payback can be a bitch. Have a nice life, future goatse.
Meanwhile, back in the rest of the world getting some junk email isnt that serious as getting killed.
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
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 ----
Meanwhile, back in the States, murderers and rapists rarely affect 1.6 billion people in one go.
Very likely, you and I both have been affected by this man Scott Levine. Even our mothers have been spammed directly or indirectly by this greedy crook. But do you have any scars? Are any of us haunted from the experience and receiving therapy for what he's done? He's been convicted of personal data theft, but have you been any more than inconvenience in an ancillary way? I doubt it.
Yeah, he deserves time in the clink. but serve more time than serial killers and dangerous re-offending rapists? Feh.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
"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.
.
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."
"One spammer down, several million to go?"
I heard that less than 200 people account for about 95% of all spam.
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.
If this guy cost every person who he spammed one minute of their lives why shouldn't he be be responsible??? Lets (conservatively) say he cost 1 minute x 100 million recipients, thats 100 million minutes of life that he cost others, or over 190 years.
He has wasted 190 years of resources that may have been spent on more productive or fulfilling purposes. I think that is a big deal.
That's not a conservative guess. Maybe for the number of recipients it is, I don't know. Keep in mind that the actual number of recipients is lower than the number of mails he sent out, because not every address spammers use actually exist. Then the number of mails that actually reached people without being caught by spam filters is still lower, a LOT lower most likely. Those relatively (!) few mails that reached actual people still wouldn't have caused them to lose 1 minute of their lives. How long does it take you to dismiss a mail as spam? Not more than a few seconds, maybe not even that.
Hey, not that I'm defending this guy. Just trying to help in making a reasonable guess about the lost time due to him.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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 spend WAY much time reading slashdot and not beeing productive then deleting a few spams. well unless the spam filters dont alredy do it for me. you honnestly believe this guy is that much more guilty then some guy who stabed his wife 50 times? dont get me wrong. im hate spam and spammers they should pay for what they do. its just that i dont think stuff like this (and other computer related crimes) is more serious then murders/rape.
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.
"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.
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.
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
Should just put a wooden stake through his heart.
Very, very slowly. Perhaps over the course of a year.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
It's a very conservative guess, since it just counts the time of people who deleted it, and not the amounts of money lost by people who actually bought shit as a result of all the spam.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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
"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."
Please mod the parent up
In my neigborhood, there are 2 sex offenders living near families with children and within blocks of an elementary school - send these jokers to prison - I will gladly keep an eye on a couple of spammers. At least I can let my kids play in front of his house (unless he starts yelling out his enlargement spams to them)
Sig? We don't need no stinking sig....
"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
Not to mention the computer resources tied up in the process. He ruined my internet!
Each of these scenarios still cost somebody (a user or ISP or some company's IT department) some money & time per message to handle, however.
Even with a VERY conservative estimate of $0.001 per message (a bit lower than what 1 sec of someone's time is worth at an hourly wage of $4.95), sending out a billion messages is about the same as costing $1mil to the community. Some of these guys have sent out a lot more messages than that.
How long would a vandal who had caused $1mil of damage be put away?
From what I've read, I have it pretty easy. Many people get a lot more than 50 a day. The time loss goes up when you count the mental context switching. Without the filters, I'd lose about an hour a day. I bill clients $125/hr for doing real work. That's a loss of $45,625 in billable time per year. With the filters active, I only process about 7 a day, so I only lose around $5,300 in billables.
Yeah, me too.Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
This might just fall into the category of cruel and unusual punishment...
Come on people. No one here seriously believes this fool is going to get 640 years. Realistically he might get 10 years and be out in 2 or 3. Wouldn't surprise me if he got 10 years and a suspended sentence with a big fat ass fine that he can't pay.
Of course I really doubt that I would lose any sleep if they frog marched him in front of a firing squad.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
No, but to punish you for dying they put you in what's known as "the hole." After spending a long time without food or water in a tiny hole six feet underground, most inmates won't want to die again any time soon.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Theft of service and fraud are both valid crimes that are a threat to society. Additionally, theft of potentially protected personal information is also a legitimate public safety concern.
Yes, 640 years is extreme. But, prison is totally appropriate for the crime.
Next time, instead of working yourself into an indignant rage and looking like an uninformed asshat, at least take the time to know what you're talking about.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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!
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?
I'm sure that you've got more than a few car thieves, robbers, and drug dealers around too. Shall we pitchfork and torch them too? Well, at least your kids can play in front of these people's houses, I mean... they're just robbers and whatnot right? MUCH better than say, someone who made a pass at someone who was underage and she decided to press charges. (Yes, this does happen, my friend spent 2 years in jail for "Gross Sexual Imposition." I was there for the 'offense' he hit on her a few times she smiled, got his number, and then pressed charges.) Now, he's a "sex offender!!!!!" The term is fairly misleading and could be *ANY* crime with sex anywhere in it. From rape to some 16 yr old girls pissed off parents pressing charges against you because you're 18 and had sex with her.
Don't believe anything you read and only half of what you hear.
A.A
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
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?
Trust me, I don't look uninformed, and I know that 640 years is the maximum.
If you weren't such a dumbfuck and would take your head out of your ass for just ONE minute, you might take a second to think and wonder why the fuck they came up with 640.
Regardless, my point is perfectly valid.
Next time think about your response before typing it out only to look like a complete fuckup.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
My Opera mail filters catch maybe 20 spam mails a day. Occasionally one slips through - maybe once a day on average. It takes me approximately half a second to notice that it's spam (cyrillic writing is a give away) and click the large button that moves it accordingly, and maybe half a second to open up the email window in the first place.
If you really take a whole freaking minute per spam mail to tweak your mail filters, you might want to improve your spam "workflow". Modern mail filters don't need anywhere near as much manual tweaking to deliver good results, Opera's built-in filter certainly doesn't and I'm sure there are still better ones.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
How is removing him from society appropriate punishment? It makes no sense whatsoever.
His goal here in spamming is to get money quick. Take away his fortune - lesson learned. What would removing his freedoms for 5 years do? If you try him in court, remove his assets, that's punishment enough.
Trust me, a millionaire couldn't STAND to be separated from his money - that is punishment enough.
I mean really, prison shouldn't even be a consideration for something like this.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
1) In what US city are you not within blocks of an elementery school? There are 2 schools within 1/4 mile of my house. That doesn't count 1 high school and 1 middle school.
2) Many sex offender lists are hopelessly outdated. People have had to post signs or move because their house is on the list and they are constantly harassed.Link
3) Most people on the sexual offenders list were listed for reasons other than pedophilia! Your children aren't their target your wife maybe. I checked my zip code and the "list" is long. About 20 individual of these 20, 10 are for 'aggravated sexual battery' , 8 are listed as rape. The other two have a long list of repeated rape, indecent liberties with a minor, aggravated sexual battery etc. These persons should not be released period!
4) Public harassment doesn't 'fix' a person from being a sexual deviant. I would rather see sex offenders given muuch longer sentances with mandatory therapy. And they don't get out until the doctor says they get out. The therapy might be expensive but if it stops one repeat offender it's worth it. Right now sexual deviants are just getting time and many aren't serving all of it
5) If they would let out some of the 3 time minor drug (Marijuana) ofenders they would have more room and save enough money to do #4
6) In regards to the spammer, they need to go after what the spammer is selling! It wouldn't happen so much if someone weren't profiting!
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
You always get some time off for good behavior if you earn it. Misbehave and you not only don't get any more, you can lose what you've gotten. It's an incentive plan to encourage prisoners to behave themselves, and from what I gather, it works.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I then get fined 75% of my assets. I now "only" have 2.5 million. No jail time.
How is this going to keep people from spamming again? I would think this would only make them spam harder.
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.
Fark humor is not funny. I'm sorry, teh funnay.
It's entirely appropriate because otherwise he would go on to some other scam. Part of prison is to punish the felon, and part of prison is to protect us from them. Look at Sanford Wallace: after the Earthlink settlement, he moved on to other things. His nightclub went belly-up, so he resorted to selling a bogus spyware removal package which actually hijacked browsers and installed spyware.
Hijacking open relays, installing trojans on unprotected machines, using botnets, faking headers, stealing credit card information, these are not the acts of people with functioning consciences: look at the number of spammers with criminal records for fraud. Spammers are sociopaths, pure and simple, and society is better off without them.
Possibly 640 years in jail? It's a start. One down, 200 to go.
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.
Possibly 640 years in jail? It's a start. One down, 200 to go.
It's vigilanteism - and you just proved my point.
Thanks!
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
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 !
1. - Point taken
2. - Fine with me
3. - not sure about 'most people', but these 2 specific cases were sexual contact with children ages 9 and 6 - Oh, right - they must have tricked the offender into thinking they were both 18!
4. - Prison doesn't 'fix' people - public harrasment of these folks just lets them know that they are being watched. Might happen again, but we know where to go first for the vigilante justice to begin.
5. - I more than agree - Marijuana should be legalized, anyway.
6. - What if they are selling a legal product?
Sig? We don't need no stinking sig....
Well, the 75% was just an example - the main point of what I was trying to say is there are other alternative punishments that would be more effective than sitting in a prison for a few years. Hit them where it hurts: financially.
Trust me, you think it's "only" 2.5 million, but if you have that much money, you become accustomed to living a certain way, spending certain amounts, etc. If you take that foundation away from those people, TRUST me, it would be a complete mindfuck.
Take all of YOUR assets, your lifestyle, cut it back by 75% or more. You'd be miserable. On top of that, take your method of acquiring that money and throw it out the window.
However, filling up prisons with spammers is really overkill. Really, you think that throwing them in the mix with muderers and rapists is fitting?
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.
Not everyone has to agree with my opinions, but I sure hope people at least are open minded enough to realize there are other alternatives, and that their personal hatred of spam shouldn't cloud their judgement, otherwise they're no different from the rest of the idiots.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
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.
It's commercial speech that is forced upon us... Forced in the sense that the speaker is asking you to pay for the infrastructure and the resources required for them to speak.
I have no issues at all with free speech. However, I do have an issue with someone's speech not being free (as in beer) for the recipient. This is why Junk Faxes are illegal.
You could make the number higher, say 100%. But what if he was pretty wealthy to begin with? Would it really be fair if a millionaire became a billionaire by spamming, then the government took away all of it? I doubt anyone would have any sympathy for him, but it's still a valid concern.
I'm not saying prison is the answer, but doing anything less than taking away everything he has gained by spamming, and then some, will be a futile attempt at stopping them.
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.
640 years should be enough for anyone!
Thanks,
Billy G
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
1. Spammers are routinely violating laws that are criminal in nature, and are subject to criminal fines, such as jail time.
2. Civil penalties have consistently demonstrated to be completely ineffective against spammers. They are either unintimidated by civil penalties, or there is no real incentive for civil prosecution of spammers because in most cases it costs more to take legal action than you can collect from the spammer under any circumstances.
You do the crime, you do the time. This guy deserves to go to jail. It may be a "white collar" crime, but it is still a crime, and more spammers need to face criminal charges in order to send a signal to those still operating that they will be hunted down. Right now almost all the virus/worm activity is the work of spammers. That is clearly criminal in nature, and I look forward to a few of those guys getting sent to a federal, pound-you-in-the-ass prison, the sooner the better, the longer the better.
Every time one of those sleazebags goes to prison, the chances of us getting less spam and worms increases. At some point, we'll crack the main network of these scumbags and you'll see spam traffic drop dramatically, and base Internet services will probably improve by a factor of two to five times more bandwidth and response time across the backbone.
Well, the 75% was just an example - the main point of what I was trying to say is there are other alternative punishments that would be more effective than sitting in a prison for a few years. Hit them where it hurts: financially.
Talk to a lawyer about civil penalties. Ask him how easy it is to dance around and get out of paying things. In situations like this, these people don't have the money to pay the fines. They are specialists and hiding their income and resources. Civil penalties don't mean squat to someone whose living is engaging in unethical behavior. It's a walk in the park to declare bankruptcy or transfer your assets to someone else, or to simply disappear and pop up elsewhere and continue your business.
These guys need to go to prison. Civil penalties are completely useless.
There crime is not selling the product, it's how they choose to market it. If I hire a thug to threaten people unless they join a union isn't that illegal marketing of a legal enterprise? By paying the spammer they are complicit in the crime.
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.
However, filling up prisons with spammers is really overkill. Really, you think that throwing them in the mix with muderers and rapists is fitting?
Actually, I in fact, do. If you cannot play nice in soceity, then get fucked.
I would also make sure they were in a population of murderers and rapists who were fairly modern and had used the internet.
Then I would give a carton of smokes to any convict who ass-raped the spammer so badly that said spammer had spend a week sleeping on his stomach with his ass elevated so the reconstructive stitches could heal properly.
That, my friend, would be justice.
Yes, I also laughed and danced a little jig when they found that russian guy dead, too.
s'wut i sed.
Hardly. Prison is for anyone that commits a crime of sufficient magnitude and is convicted of it. If I embezzle millions of dollars from my employer, say, thereby putting said employer out of business and costing many people their jobs ... are you saying I should just get community service? Should Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay simply get a slap on the wrist, pay a fine, and go on their merry way? A lot of people got hurt by their actions too. None of the preceeding examples involved any violence whatsoever, but sometimes the white-collar types deserve a prison sentence just as much as the neighborhood rapist. Prison is for people that cause significant amounts of damage, either to individuals or to society as a whole. Spammers cost society a ton of time and money, they openly break the law, and I really don't see a problem with one of them getting his just desserts. I guess your idea is that because he is only causing a small amount of injury to a whole goddamn lot of people, that is less actionable than if he had caused a whole lot of harm to only one person. That's not really true, when you realize that this guy (and others like him) has cost corporations and individuals hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, all to buy him a bigger house and a new Mercedes every year.
Suppose I figured out a way to make a profit by illegally tapping into the nation's water supply, incidentally increasing the operating expenses of the various suppliers and raising the price of fresh water for everyone, to the tune of a few hundred million. Would you consider that sufficiently criminal to warrant a prison term? In the case of spam, these guys have abused an increasingly important international resource, the Internet, costing the world an amount of money that is way, way out of proportion to the amount of profit the spammers actually make. Yes, I'd say the punishment fits the crime just fine.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
If he sold credit card and/or financial information to someone else, it's quite easy to completely destroy someone's life through identity theft.
Thing is, this is the second scheme in a row that scott been involved in. The first time he avoided prison time and his company got fined. He's not avoiding prison this time though.
I don't think prison will stop him. He'll just find some other scheme when he gets out.
...and that is why you are a fucking hypocrite!
Sorry you fit the mold oh so well.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
But Droopy, I still don't see how me wanting to send spammers to prison makes me a hypocrite.
I have never prettended to beleive that i do not think spammers should rot in jail.
Definitions:
hypocrite: A person given to hypocrisy.
hypocrisy: when someone pretends to believe something that they do not really believe or that is the opposite of what they do or say at another time:
more Definitions:
Dumbfuck: A person that throws words around with exclamation points that only have a vague idea what that word means.
See: DroopyStonx
s'wut i sed.
Haha, funny man.
What are they gonna call the film? Demolition Spam?
Auto-check your UK lottery lines
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?
I agree with you. My solution is to give him a completely fair trial in public, with a public hanging immediately afterwards. This solution would be effective as a deterent, and would be much more cost effective than 640 years in prison. Could also impound the totality ofhis assets - profit !
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Should Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay simply get a slap on the wrist, pay a fine, and go on their merry way?
I dunno, but something like 45,000 hours of community service shoveling shit at the local police department's mounted unit or cleaning sewers of "obstructions" would be something that most people would be happy with. Of course, if you skip town or whatever, throw them in the clink.
Fine? Fuck no, but perhaps jail isn't the best thing for all situations.
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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.
You missed the point.
We put other people who commit fraud and steal things in jail. He is no different. End of story.
Or, do you propose that everybody who steals things and commits fraud not be in jail?
I agree that he should not be "sitting in a prison". He should be put to hard labor, so that even if he somehow got hold of a computer he would be too physically exhausted to press the key to initiate a spam run.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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.
Hmm, reward a rapist with a carton of smokes, but punish the spammer as much as you can? Which one hurts society the most?
I hate spammers as much as anyone else, and I even agree with a little bit of jailtime, but come on, that is a bit backward.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
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.
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.