Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Punish a 16-year-old Spammer?
An anonymous reader writes "A 16 year old 'Boy Spammer', David Lennon, has been told by a judge that as punishment for his crimes he can't leave his bedroom for two months during curfew. CNET thinks this is no punishment at all: "With the streets awash with axe murderers, terrorists and paedophiles, staying in and playing games seems like a reasonable response. Given that our kids are growing up as stay-in gamers, the Boy Spammer's curfew is no more punishment for the blighter than sentencing a boy caught speeding to two months on a race track." Apparently Lennon used a piece of email bombing software called Avalanche to wreak revenge on his ex-employer, Domestic and General Group. His five million emails contained the message "You will die in seven days.""
Diabolical!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
See, this spam worked because about 200 of the people received it did die in 7 days. Its always that small percentage of people responding to the spam that keeps the spammers going. Damn those people.
[moderators: this is supposed to be funny]
Tell a 16 year old to stay in the bedroom? Well hey, don't throw me in the briar patch!
No, what this kid should be doing is community service. Work in a soup kitchen, pick up garbage by the side of the road, help out his common man by distributing clothes in an inner city, something like that. In addition, I'd like to see him have all private computer access restricted (can only use a computer in the presence of an adult until he demonstrates he can act like an adult) and to undergo some sort of therapy to deal with his anti-social mores as sending out emails saying "you will die in seven days" is pretty sick. This is not punishment per se, however. I see it more as societal rehabilitation.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Great, now he has more time to spam!!!
..but video games were still around when I was a kid. Being grounded to my room included the removal of anything that I could enjoy doing. I don't understand why they don't just take his computer away..
Blerg.
Make him write out each email he sent on a blackboard, all 5 million of them.
- Make him consume everything he was selling/trying to sell
- Forced community service fixing virus-laden windows boxes
- Public flogging
- Format every disk/hard drive/CD he owns
- Break his fingers
And that's just off the top of my head. How easy is that?
Warhammer forums
A 16 year old 'Boy Spammer', David Lennon, has been told by a judge that as punishment for his crimes he can't leave his bedroom for two months during curfew.
That's punishment? If he's a nerd that's a reward!
He should be locked up in a reading room with all the Harry Potter books. That'll learn him.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A 16 year old 'Boy Spammer', David Lennon, has been told by a judge that as punishment for his crimes he can't leave his bedroom for two months during curfew.
It would be better if he was prevented from leaving his bedroom for any reason whatsoever for the next two months. He'd get a little pail in the corner where he could go to the bathroom in, and his mother would have to give him a sponge bath in his bed.
How about:
He's allowed to have only one e-mail address for the rest of his life, which has no spam filtering. This e-mail address is provided to everyone he spammed, who are encouraged to sign him up for whatever mailing lists they choose.
Sending "you will die in seven days" millions of times to your ex-employer does not qualify as spamming in my book. He wasn't sending advertisements. He wasn't collecting personal information to resell. He wasn't doing anything that typically qualifies as spamming.
This is just plain old harassment, and the punishment sounds fine.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
If you actually want to PUNISH the kid, not to 'rehabilatate' him, then do something evil and disgusting. Like get all those people, who received his emails into a building, bring in the kid and then let every single person in that building to spend some time with him one on one with no rules at all. They could do anything they wanted without any consequences. That'll be a punishment.
If you want to rehabilitate him, this one I don't know much about, I only know how to do evil and disgusting stuff.
--
You can't handle the truth.
spam filter.. human...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Err...where's his computer located?
Cheers,
Ian
What do you do with a drunk'en spammer?
What do you do with a drunk'en spammer?
What do you do with a drunk'en spammer?
Earl-eye in the morning?
Way hay Viagra makes you riseth
Way hay Cialis raises your girthith
Way hay Levitra if you want the sexish
Earl-eye in the morning.
Shave his belly with a rusty razor.
Shave his belly with a rusty razor.
Shave his belly with a rusty razor.
Earl-eye in the morning.
I'd simply elbow drop the little bastard from the top rope..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
What about the sort of Kevin Mitnick punishment... denying him computer access and/or Internet access. In this kid's case, I'd go for the Internet access ban or so.
Seems appropriate to me, what with his crime being death threats by spamming.
And let them cane his ass. I'm serious. He won't even think about doing it again after that.
put him in stocks and beat him with a cain. Then for the next 6 months, make him where a shirt with a Scarlet "S" on the front and back while carrying a sign that explains what he did. Plus some community service and a hefty fine to be paid by him, not his parents.
"CNET thinks this is no punishment at all"
He hardly did anything. Being grounded for two months seems pretty reasonable.
I couldn't agree more with this:
It's as though the judge is saying "Well done son! Here, have a cookie!"
ilovegeorgebush
"Who is this warrior with pecs like melons and knees of fringe?"
-Todd
Put down the sig, and step away from the computer.
Bernie was talking to his friend Jack about his rebellious son Yossi. "When I was a youngster and did something wrong, my parents punished me by sending me to my bedroom without supper. I hated it. But our Yossi has his own colour TV, phone, computer and DVD player in his bedroom so we can't do that - it wouldn't be much of a punishment."
:) great days where those =op
:)
"So what do you do, then?" asked Jack.
"We send him up to our bedroom without supper!
When I was younger (on secondary and high school) my parents sometimes used to punish me sending me to my bedroom. Unfortunately the home PC was *in my bedroom* so I just made a sad face and went up there, turned on the computer and started programming for aaaaaaaall the rest of the day
Oh, and the mentioned text was from here. I just remembered the passage but the page is the first that came on google
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
With the streets awash with axe murderers, terrorists and paedophiles, staying in and playing games seems like a reasonable response
So why not stick him in a nice safe jail cell? All the real criminals are either on the streets or locked in their bedrooms.
Seriously, they should take a page (just one) from Kevin Mitnick's terms of rehabilitation and take away his internet access for a year or two. If he's an ordinary teen that's a punishment worse than death.
by bumba
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
This is a mail bomb. They are different.
He should spend one hour in jail for every spam message he sent.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Working at McDonald's.
I must be missing something here... Yes, for a start, sitting inside for someone like this is not going to be a punishment, but also reading the article: he can't leave his house between the hours of 12.30am and 7am on weekdays, and between 12.30am and 10am on weekends So in fact....he is given time to sleep....
Reminds me of the "I love you" virus, and all the idio... erm... computer-illiterate people who opened it because they genuinely thought that their boss/secretary/whole-fucking-department sent them a genuine love declaration. Or all the viruses that get opened because someone really thought that their long lost cousin Amir N'gbendu from Nigeria sent them a porn-video/incredible-investment-opportunity-sprea dsheets/whatever. Conveniently packed in an .exe file. It must be a self-extracting zip, really. Would your long lost cousin lie to you?
So being that some people _are_ that gullible, I wonder how many actually went and wrote their will, said goodbye to their loved ones, and arranged their own funerals, after reading "you're going to die in 7 days" in an email.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... kill him in seven days.
They should make him stay in his parent's bedroom. Punish the kid for being a dope And punish his parents for raising an ignorant twerp.
He's electronically tagged, although the curfew times are a joke- 12.30-7.30am weekdays and 13.30-10.00 on weekends. When the little blighter will be alseep...he's a teenager for crying out loud!
....so any really irate ex-work buddies dont have far to look...
Oh and he is not 16, he was 18 (here, and here) but is now 19 (here).
He has been named and located though
Seriously, make him wear one of those signs that states what he's done.
"I'm doing community service for sending millions of spam emails to you."
Then make him clean up public areas. Or better yet, make him walk around a mall, or a business district.
This type of behavior *thrives* on the anonymity of the Internet. Making his community or locality realize who he is and what he's done will take away the privilege of that anonymity. It would put a very strong and real consequence to his seemingly risk-free spammer actions.
"With the streets awash with axe murderers, terrorists and paedophiles,"
What a ridiculous and more to the point, extremely irresponsible statement!
I wish media companies such as cnet had to help pay the medical insurance costs for all the millions of obese kids who have become that way because their parents were too terrified to let them outside for fear of all these boogeymen.
It's digusting that when the biggest killer in our country is heart disease, the best cure for this disease (exercise) is discouraged due to risks that statistically non-existant.
Media companies are meant to inform on the truth, not make their own risks up and then justify them because they affect 1 in a million (or often less) people.
He'd be facing federal charges, and a civil suit that would ruin him financially. But since he's a spammer who does real and quantifible damage to productivity, as well as making e-mail increasingly less viable he gets a slap on the wrist.
What this kid did wasn't spam. He wasn't selling anything, wasn't soliciting personal information. He was harassing a former employer because for some reason he had a bone to pick with them. He tried to DoS their mail servers with death threats. If anything, this kid should be charged as a vandal and fined for the dammage and man-hours that it took to unclog the mail server and clear the accounts, as well as some well deserved community service either clearing royally screwed windows PCs of ad/spyware/viri from public PCs or by physically hard labor.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
How do you punish a 16-year-old Spammer? Community service is too good for him and doesn't send a strong enough message to other pubescent male teens thinking of starting Spam businesses... I say string 'em up by his testicles!
The vast majority of you /.ers are vicious. I hope I never have to be "taught a lesson" from you guys.
Where's the compassion?
After visiting the article linked to in TFA, I'm amazed this kid got off so lightly!
"On Wednesday morning, the judge ruled that Lennon should be subject to a curfew, which means he must stay at home between the hours of 12.30am and 7am on weekdays, and between 12.30am and 10am on weekends. If he breaks this curfew, he risks a more serious sentence.
The curfew has been timed so as not to interfere with Lennon's work at a local cinema. The judge said it was a "happy coincidence" that it will end the day before Lennon starts college in September. "
and
"The prosecution dropped its demand that Lennon should pay costs amounting to £29,000, which arose from his attack on Domestic & General Group in which 5 million emails crashed its servers."
So not only did his spamming threaten the recipients, it crashed the company's email servers, stopping legitimate, business-related email from reaching the same.
The judge slaps his wrist and grounds him except for work? No fines, and it drops just before he leaves for college.
From the other stories I've been reading on Slashdot, I thought the knee-jerk British reaction would be to slap an ASBO on his ass and call him "Pip"?
Which type of ruling is the exception to the rule - leniency for first-time offenders, or throwing the book at them? All I ever have read about in the US regarding computer-related offenses is hard time in pound-you-in-the-ass prison.
16 year old kids are out there mugging people, stabbing people, and doing all sorts of things. If we just sit down, say "Poor little kiddies", and tell them they're bad, what good is it going to do?
They may not be fully developed, but I sure as hell would expect myself to be held accountable for any act I did at 16 years old.
I suppose if he'd killed somebody it would have been two months in his bedroom without TV or games.
Make him eat 5 cans of S.P.A.M. everyday for a year.
nothing
Suspending drivers license or eligibility for drivers license for 1-2 years would be pretty good punishment for this kid.
Each person who received the email should give the boy a swift kick in the a**; I think a few million boots to the bum would help him remember the lesson.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Am I the only person here who thinks sending an e-mail message saying "You will all die in seven days" needs to get the kid a little more than 2 months? Maybe he's not a psycho, but still. That's not something you just send out and get a slap on the wrist for. Granted, this isn't a punishment per se, but he needs to see some consequence for his action.
Starmen.net
I'll tell ya what, when that little snot got caned many years back, I was cheering it.
That's what we need in this country; Extremely painful punishment for kids in the justice system. Jr got caught tagging a freeway sign? Cane'em. Little shit spams death threats? Cane'em.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I think parents need to start being held accountable for their child's misbehaviour. This way the dilemma of how to punish the child is avoided and the source of the problem is addressed.
Given what I've seen, I have to say the single largest reason why kids are so screwed up is because of bad parenting.
"How do you punch a 16-year old spammer."
The weekday one is a bit of a joke. No 16 year old is leaving there house before 7am or is even awke then. Also 12:30 isn't a horrible time to have to be home, he can still have plenty of fun. And when I was 16 I usually woke up around noon on weekends, so 10am isn't all that bad.
Basically the judge should have just said "I sentence you to a solid 7-8 hours of rest every day!" it would have the same effect.
I don't see how the judge will know if the kid was actually in his bedroom unless the parents report him (unlikely) or if he gets caught by the police after curfew. After a week he could probably beg his parents to hang out at friends houses and be back to normal. I have to agree that community service would work far better solution.
I'd say do a bit of Mitnik's punishment on him; disallow him to use the Internet for a period of time (perhaps 7 weeks along with his "7 days" e-mail?). I would presume that he'd have to use the computer at least (not necessarily the Internet) for homework and such, being he is only 16.
I also would make him spend that time doing community service. Maybe he'll find something else to do instead of spamming his ex-employer[s].
What happened to being banned from all electronic equipment until the age of 18? How about the little prick can't use email in any fashion? Why don't we punish him for the HACKING he did? idiots. Lets lock him exactly where he committed the crimes. He probly already didnt leave his house!
As far as I can see, what he did was a DoS, not spamming. He didn't attempt to make any sort of income from sending unsolicited emails, he just bombarded one mail server with 5 million emails.
I don't understand why the judge, with the parents' consent, didn't simply take away his access to the internet, or a computer all together. It seems like it would be a much more applicable punishment for a crime that requires a computer to commit.
I would have opted for "You are under house arrest in a house with no television, video, gaming or computer devices until such a time as you have hand written an apology to each of the mail recipients."
But I'm a draconian Chapeau D'âne
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
You mean he left his room before he got caught?
How do you punish a spammer? Well, you're right, it is a tough choice. On one hand, you have corporal punishment. On the other, capital. Tough decision.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
And have her spank him like the bad boy that he....... ohh... wait... wrong forum
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Stuff him with Viagra and send him on a holiday to Florid- wait, you said 16-year-old??
Actually, this sounds like a death threat to me. Aren't there special punishments for things along those lines?
I'm a pretty big fan of corporeal punishment by the government, with appropriate moderation and for appropriate crimes. It's immediate, and only really messed-up people like it. I'm thinking that for this kid, probably a caning would be appropriate. And no, I do NOT consider it cruel and unusual punishment. All punishment is intended to cause mental suffering - why should arriving at that ends through physical means be considered any more off limits than arriving at it through prison, community service, etc?
castration
I guess it really depends on how severe his spamming was. But I wouldn't let anyone just go if it was a serious issue. A crime is a crime... even if it's something as simple as that. And I know, there are far worse crimes in the world, but there are also far worse punishments for those bad crimes. I'm sure they could find something minor that would not make him do it again.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Make him sign up for sports. The ones you play outside with other people. Preferably contact sports.
i on.billofrights.html#amendmentviii
Force him to attempt to ask out a cheerleader. Repeat until one says "yes" or he turns 30, whichever comes first.
Give him a makeover.
Yeah, yeah, 8th amendment* and all that...
* http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
What we really need is sanctions against incompetant and irresponsible journalism. The average joe doesn't have a chance of ever getting a clue, since they are constantly being misinformed by the media. This is the number 1 reason why people still use Windows IMNSHO. They don't know any better because they get their understanding of the issues from clueless "journalists".
As far as the "punishment" for this kid, he shouldn't get any. What he needs is reform . So long as the US mob mentality supports a punishment paradigm over a reform one, US society as a whole is doomed. This holds especially true when the offender in question is a teenager. People
I guess only one question remains
... and in anticipation of the ignorant moron who will claim I contradicted myself
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Make him hand-write one copy of the email for each email that got sent.
If you want to be mean, make him write out the headers as well.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I take it none of you guys have ever been on house arrest. I was. It SUCKED. Horribly. All of you people that say its easy, imagine how much it sucked to be in my house, and only visited by friends twice in three months. Yeah, you start to go a bit crazy, no interaction with your peers. So yeah, don't think its too light.
Yay, I have a sig.
I suggest we lure him into a chile con carnival, feed him chile with his parents remains in them. When he crys you have his favorite band come out and embarrass him!
Error 2101: all your sig are belong to us
Simple. Do the opposite of locking him in his room.
Make him attend a minimum of three raging parties per week, each one primarily populated by jocks and hotties.
If he's 18 and spamming people, he does not have the social skills necessary to do well in such an environment. He'll cry for the warmth and security of his home, but he should be forced to stay until the last jock has wedgie'd him.
Spam sandwich.
Just let him do it again!
1. Make him write down "You will die in seven days." in papers
2. count # of person being spammed. five million ?! great!
3. Get him to delivered his hardcopy of spam message manually. It must be a signature on it.
He can use whatever means, such as photocopy his spam message, or hire someone to deliver it...or whatever.
In Soviet Russia, spam canes you!
Ponies!?!?!?! OMG?!?!?!
Caning is in place for this boy.
Math
Ok, there is too much reference here to the movie The Ring. See a movie, die in 7 days. Read spam, die in 7 days.
Kill him while he sleeps? /right?
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
I was punished that way as well (6 months in a stretch). Didn't have any electricity either. Had to read books by the light of the moon. I read a lot though.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
'nuff said....
1. He can not use or own any electronic equipment connected to the internet
2. Repay any damages to his victums. Damages includes cost of removal of spam.
3. Volunteer as a spam watcher for an ISP for 6 months.
These are actually legal punishments. Spammer can be held liable for costs of removing the spam.
\
He should write 5 million times, "I promise I will not spam again.". If he could do 4 of these lines a minute, and write 16 hours a day, it would take him about 3 and half years to complete the punishment.
Make the spammer hand write an apology letter to each person he spammed. Oh and he has to lick each and every envelop and stamp with his tongue!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
It seems to me that this guy is going to receive a punishment much worse than staying in his room for 2 months. His name is on the Internet, attached to the information that he sought revenge against an ex-employer. Wow. Good luck with that whole "rest of your career" thing you thought you had.
Nerd Rock In Progress
And if Lennon only got "grounded" (how else do you describe that joke of a sentence?) because he's 16 and must not have known what he was doing, the poor soul, he's still got two years until he's adult enough to see the consequences of his actions and we should be nice to him after all didn't we all make mistakes when we were young we shouldn't throw his entire life away for one little problem that doesn't seem right what would his mother think let he who is without sin cast the first stone...
Nope.
Now give this kid justice...not an oppurtunity to play CS for two months straight on judge's orders.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
It may interest you all to know that he now works for a record label as the designer and moderator of a website for one of their artists. Of course this means he has access to their systems!
Maybe the judge sympathized with the kid?
Heck, maybe people were glad he did what he did.
Regardless, I personally applaud him for exacting revenge upon the company.
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
I am reminded of a technical conference I attened many years ago. The subject of one panel was "Writing RSX11 Device Drivers". Many of the leading lights in this niche of the industry were on the panel, including one of the all time greats, Ralph Stamerjohn. During the audience Q&A, one of the audience members asked the question "What should you do with new RSX11m driver developers". One of the DEC people on the panel started to answer. Ralph, a famous curmudgeon, grabbed the mike and answered "Take them out and shoot them". Ralph was probably joking...and it seems a buit extreme for 16 year old spammers, but you have to admit, the solution does have a cerain appealing sound to it...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Tape his hands together and hide all the lotion and kleenex.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
It's pretty clear this kid didn't get enough wacks early enough, so he should have gave him jail time OR have his parents publicly spank his ass in front of his highschool every day for a week. He can either go to jail, or his parents spank him publicly. If it were me, I'd choose the spanking, and also choose never to do that spammer crap again.
Finder of the any key.
I'd recomend making him do community service, tech support for the elderly, and not having a computer for a few months. Besides no parties, no friends and the such... Of course 1 webmail for a year without spam proctection that would be given to all would be quite nice...
Blind are we who do not know that we are blind. The world has been boring ever since I got here.
Watch long hours of spongebob squarepants,oprah, and after he is done with that he should be forced to debug a windows 2000 debug version computer with no help at all.
Give him one tiny little paper cut for each person whose time he wasted.
When he bleeds to death from five million paper cuts, well, justice will have been done.
Start holding 16 year olds fully liable for their criminal actions as ADULTS. In many states if you commit murder at 16 years of age you can be held responsible as an adult, so why not for ALL crimes and please spare me the "You wouldn't like it if you were held responsible at 16 for your actions" or "A 16 year old does not take into account the consequences of their actions" nonsense. At 16 years of age, provided you don't have a mental deficiency, you know damn well if what you are doing is right or wrong and if they don't then maybe its time we start holding parents partially liable for their children's actions. If the parents are held liable then maybe they will start doing a better job of being the most important part of their children's lives. A large product of who we are as people is due to our parents influence or lack of influence in our lives so why is it that criminals can use their parents as an excuse to get less time on their sentence after conviction but those same parents that played a large role in making their child the criminal they became cannot be held liable for their poor parenting when the child is still a minor?
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Sending 5 million death threats would be considered quite serious if he were an adult. So show him what his next steps would be. 1. Serve as a serving-line attendant in the closest penal institution. Serving food to gentlemen while they comment on how much they'd like to show a 'cute thing' like him a good time might make him think twice about having the place as his next residence. 2. Since he's shown that he can't control himself with electronics, ban him from using ANYTHING electronic for the two month sentence. No ipod, cell phone, computer, or even TV. Might be good for him to have time to reflect. 3. The curfew is silly in light of his allowed job. But fine. Let him keep the job (in fact, enforce it), but have all wages returned to the company that had to spend the money to fix his attack. With these items inforced, I don't have any issue with a two-month sentence on a first time offense. The point is to ensure it doesn't happen again (or anything similar).
This is England. The "judge" would have been a lay magistrate, just a member of the public with special training. Not, anyway, a professional lawyer who would probably have had to ask "What is the internet?", assuming the hearing was held before lunch and therefore that the "judge" was still relatively sober.
The apparent leniency of this sentence might have something to do with the aggrieved party, a large company, initially demanding 29,000 pounds in compensation from a sixteen-year-old boy, not a very nice or proportionate thing to do. This demand by the prosecution was dropped during the trial. It's possible that the magistrates were showing that bullying of this kind is not on, in England, and that if this company's mail servers could be so easily knocked over by a sixteen year-old, they couldn't have been much good in the first place.
Computer specialists might object to the idea, but lay magistrates are partly there to reflect public opinion, and public opinion doesn't hold computers in very high regard.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
internet connection and forbid him to use a computer on/via the 'net for 5-years.
either
1) let him pay damages for the spam he sent
2) a) let his parents pay damages for the spam he sent
b) let him sit in juvie til he is 18 and bar him from the internet for xx time or forever
Being in his room after curfew is what the majority of 16 year olds do anyway, so I don't see how the hell that is a punishment.
At the very least he needs a year or two of community service. 5 million emails should be at least a few hundred $ in damages, right? Probably more in the 4 or 5 digits though.
Have him work for the state parks system.
With his help, the UK could reintroduce the "tree" into their ecosystem.
sentence him to not touch a computer until his 18th birthday? With lockup being the penalty for violating this rule? Now granted, they should have taken the kid out in a field somewhere and left him on the ground in a shower of crows, but, denying a teenager computer access is almost equivelent these days.
"We don't need the death penalty. We've got the tossed salad man. Shit, if I had a choice right now between the electric chair and tossing a salad - I'd be like, 'so where do you plug it in? shouldn't I be wet?'
Everyone's talking about public education. Kids are outta control. We need tougher rules. We need prayer in schools. We don't need that shit. We just need the tossed salad man. He'd straighten those kids out. Hey, Jimmy. You got a D. You know what that means. NOOOO! NOOOO! I don't wanna toss a salad! I don't wanna toss a salad! I'm gonna read! I'm gonna learn to read" -- Chris Rock
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I bet his computer is in his bedroom! Now the judge gets the spam!
'Are you right or left handed' 'right...' 'WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM' 'Not anymore'
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
Going to roll with the majority on this one. But combine some things.
He will be banned from any form of electronic device that can connect to the internet. Now the problem will be how he will get his school work done, well we can add that he will only be allowed to use the computers at school and with someone monitoring him. Or he can use a computer but it must be disconnected from the internet. I can get all technical and add the use of content filtering and firewall appliances but simpler the better.
He must also be signed up for an extra-curriculur activity or a form of community service that requires outside activity.
Oh and kiss the video games good-bye!!
Oh and to the guy with the "Reform" idea, screw that it doesn't work, any potential criminal with half a brain can "pretend" to be reformed. If someone does something wrong and they know that rather than getting some form of real punishment, some pencil neck is going to toss him in a low-security psych ward. While there they will "talk" to him about what he has done and try to peel back the layers of his complicated criminal mind to find out that when he was a kid he saw his dog get hit by a car, and thats why he is the way he is. No offense, but I want to see my tax dollars put fear into the hearts of criminals so that if they so much as think of committing a crime they will piss themselves when they remember what happen last time.
Dewser - all around techy "In the immortal words of Socrates - 'I drank what?'"
I'm kinda baffled by this: you don't punish a 16-year-old, you punish the people responsible for the actions of the 16-year-old and that means the parents, whos mandate clearly includes a minimum of oversight over their offspring at least to the degree of ensuring that they don't harm those around them.
If we actually held parents responsible for the actions of their children, maybe more parents would start taking the whole "parenting" thing seriously and these kinds of problems could be avoided in the first place.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Making him pay for his food with the money he can get from the banker in Nigeria while giving him a cocktail of penis enlargement pills and viagra.
27 character message * 5,000,000 = 135 million characters
How about making him pick up 135 million cans of soda? The guys at the local recycling center would have plenty of work to do.
.. a 16 year old can be sentanced to death or life in prison, they I think that a 16 year old can be sentanced to what an adult spammer would be sentanced to... staying in his room with his video games and probably a computer is not really a punishment, considering that's probably where he sent all the spam from in the first place...
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Have him write software rules to block other spammers. He'll be good at it. Okay it's not a punishment but hey.
Easy. Just take away the check the movie studio gave him for this obvious viral marketing campaign.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
A few years ago, I got a student's misdirected message that said "I am going to kill you tonight". I received this because I own a domain in ".com" that's the same as a boarding school in ".co.uk", and some of the teenagers there haven't figured out the domain name system yet. This was shortly after Columbine, so it seemed important to do something. So I called up the school, after some difficulty got someone there after hours, and read them the message. They weren't too worried, explaining to me that it was a 13 year old sending the message.
In the US, a SWAT team would have been sent.
Hey, forcing him to watch that would be a benefit, not a curse, because eventually everyone ends up having floppy, saggy adult sex and it's a lot easier to come to grips with it knowing it will happen vs. just discovering one day it's what you're left with.
You say to the corporation 'Mail server broke after only 5 million emails ? How fragile. Get a proper mail service provider'.
I did this once as a kid, about 9 years ago with Avalanche. I'm suprised that program is still around. There was someone on ICQ who wouldn't leave me alone, so I flooded his email inbox. AT&T got smart about it and killed my internet connection. The parents weren't too thrilled about that one.
Simply set up a web page that publishes every email address he uses for the rest of his life... and let the other spammers punish him!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
... With the streets awash with axe murderers, terrorists and paedophiles, ...
...streets are awash... kind of crap.
Ummm, yea.... I know when I go outside thats ALL I see everywhere. I dont even notice the Blonde in the bikini anymore because there are so many bad people outside waiting to jump me/blow me up/swipe my wallet....
Does anyone else find a sentence like that in the article to be more than a little ridiculous? Everyone is so afraid of everyone else I wonder when people will start saying "I got scared... I was nervous... luckily for me that it was MY shadow that I was uneasy about. But it could have just as easily been the shadow of an axe murderer sneaking up on me."
Yes, the above is ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than saying the
Death.
Confine him to his room with a Windows computer that is missing three significant keys...
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
You seem to have missed the distinction between COMMENTARY and JOURNALISM.
The slashdot-linked article is clearly COMMENTARY (The column is "Crave Talk") and the original article (which was conveniently linked from the first paragraph, so you wouldn't have to search hither and yon for the source) is JOURNALISM.
Pretty clearly a UK judge, ruling on a UK teen, reported in a UK publication, by a UK Journalist (use Google to search for "Colin Barker cnet UK" and you find numerous hits which include "Colin Barker CNET UK reported from London" - I don't think they meant London, Ohio). I'm not sure where your rant on "US mob mentality" and US incarceration practices comes from.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Bilateral inguinal orchidectomy. Done without anesthetic.
Lemon curry?
Close.
/got nuttin
Tape his hands together, behind his back, and hide all the lotion and kleenex.
I too, was once 16!!!
...tied to the roof by his toenails (or testicles) and beat with organically grown vegetables.
Most people throw objects with a spin, so Campbell's Creamy Tomato (TM) may prove problematic due to it's mostly fluid content. There is even a popular Moment of Inertia Physics Lab experiment that actually uses soup cans to illustrate this phenomenon.
You should use their Chunky (TM) brand instead - less wobble should provide better accurracy. No point in creating sharp edges if the projectile misses its target, right?
Lastly, you can ignore this issue and just freeze the cans. However, cold hands usually don't promote accurate throws.
Out of morbid curiosity, why the obsession with Campbell's Creamy Tomato (TM)?
Same as any other spammer, is this a trick question?
The subject line contains a "prediction", too... but I think it should count as a death threat in most, if not all, cases.
So you're saying a psychic who says to expect a death in a the family is guilty of making a death threat?
Yes, if it's not part of his act. Psychic powers aren't real, and the courts don't accept them as evidence. Unless the "prediction" is stated as part of a game (like the "prediction" game the psychics play), there's no reason not to treat it as a death threat.
No, I think you too loosely interpret the word "threat". It's more like a completely uneducated prediction with little or no damage caused beyond a bunch of people thinking "Who the hell sent this?"
The only way to know for sure that some unlikely event will happen in the future is to cause it. To make a statement saying that someone will die in seven days is almost always the same as saying you will kill them, or have them killed, within that time frame.
If you don't think fear of death causes damage to a society, perhaps you should look up the original meaning of the word "terrorism"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa's_Date_with_Dens ity#Homer.27s_.22Happy_Dude.22_scam
"Hello, this is Homer Simpson aka Happy Dude! The court has ordered me to call every person in town to apologize for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to : Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power!"
Simpson's references are funny. So funny that they can get parent posts modded Funny. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if this post was modded funny. You might think it is Informative, but you are the only one who didn't get the joke.
This is true punishment for the computer people. No computers, electronic media (radios, TV, cell phone, land line phone, etc.) and other forms of electonic equipment (Gameboys, LED lights, timers, etc.) will punish these people. Do that for at least 1 year then they will suffer from withdraw symptoms and loose their edge in doing spam and sending other junk.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I actually know the guy! this things been going on for over 3 years now!
and to be honest the company deserved it after what they did to him.
You're essentially repeating the talking points that Enron paid for to divert people from the fact that Arnold was planning not to try to recover any of the money from the Enron scam that ripped California utility customers off for billions of dollars using staged power shutdowns to scare people into paying any amount of money the power companies demanded.
Thanks for moving to Oregon, the average IQ in California went up when you crossed the state line.
Do us a favor. Don't come back.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Put him to work doing something physical. I guess cleaning trash off roadsides would be a minimum; I'd rather see him using a pick on thr road or something. And make him wear a vest with giant letters in international orange stating "CONVICTED SPAMMER".
That's a message for him *and* the other clueless twits who might be headed his direction.
I'm sure that he'll never do it again, even if he survives.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Though I suspect that Hormel would be the wrong company to ask about this.
Anybody know a congresscritter in desperate need of a campaign issue?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Get smart Judges. If you leave him access to a computer, he can still spam. You want to get tough, use the loosest definition of a computer and ban him from using that. It would eliminate LOTS of other toys, and make him be low tech for a while.
Don't you assholes realise how much it sucks to be a teenager in western countries? I salute him for taking his agression to a higher level and shedding light on our plight.
Shotgun with rock salt to the balls?
That'll learn 'em.
1. Take away his electronics - computers, cell phones, Gameboy, PS2, etc.
2. Incarcarate him if he's caught using any electronic device.
3. Make him make restitution to both the ISP's and the recipients of his missives. He has to work to pay for the bandwidth that he used up.
4. He has to write, by hand (no electronic devices) apology letters to each recipient of one of his messages. Then he has to look up the address of each person, by hand and address the envelopes. Then he has to pay for the stamps and mail them.
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
Dave Lennon will be making a statement tomorrow (25 August) concerning his crime and punishment. Which, incidently happens to be a curfew between the hours of 12:30AM and 7:30AM during which time he must remain within his house.
The statement will be made at:
http://justsomeboy.com/
I like this tossing a salad idea as punishment. It might help the kid turn over a new leaf. (ducks)
Take a deep breath, engage the brains before typing and all that.
1. I don't know about you, but when I have my inbox full of "I love you" messages from the whole fucking marketting department, most of them guys too... I get... suspicious, to say the least. Even without knowing how the computer works or doesn't, it's something out of the extraordinary enough to be worth at least a "WTF??" thought, you know.
2. There were people who _knew_ about the "I love you" virus, or get told about scams, spam, etc, and still do it anyway. I don't know about you, but I'd file those squarely under "retarded".
3. The way the computer is "supposed" to work is good and fine, and we could even aggree mostly, but in the meantime this is how it _does_ work IRL. Fantasy and "the way it's supposed to work" are that-away, reality is in the other direction. You can't just live in a fantasy world where computers just work. RL won't go away just because you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge it.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of people seem to attempt just that: to ignore reality and hope that it will just get away. They wear their "I don't know anything about this tech crap" attitude like a badge of honour, and outright refuse to learn even the basics of how to use their computers. And seem to think that if they steadfastly refuse to read any "Do you want to do this?" dialog, the computer would somehow get a clue and turn into something that it isn't. It doesn't work that way.
To give you an almost 1-to-1 analogy: It's as stupid as thinking that if you refuse to believe in veneral diseases or pregnancy, you're exempt from them. Yes, in an ideal world, sex between perfect strangers would be safe and just work without risks. In the real world, however, those problems do exist. It's that simple. You can't change reality by simply refusing to acknowledge it.
It's as stupid as thinking that if you steadfastly believe that cars are trivial to drive, then you can just jump into one without learning to drive first. Yes, in an ideal SF world, cars would be 100% safe, would require no skill to get you from point A to point B, and never cause any injury or property damage. In the real world, they're not. You can't switch to fantasy rules by just believing in them hard enough.
4. An even more abject category are those who just refuse to use their time to learn anything, because they know that the nerd next door (or everyone in their address book, in the case of viruses) has nothing better to do than clean up after them. I find that highly offensive and anti-social. It's like shitting in the middle of the room, just because you're sure that your janitor neighbour must love moping up shit, so you'll just ask him to come over and do that.
5. Straw men are not a substitute for logic or for elementary reading and comprehension skills. Learn to read, and maybe to answer to what was written there, not to whatever the voices in your head say. In the message you're answering to:
* _nowhere_ does it say that they should install Linux. They can stick to Windows, MacOS, OS/2 or whatever the fuck floats their boat, for all I care.
* _nowhere_ do I ask of them to _love_ computers. For all I can be arsed to care, they can hate it with a Sith-like passion, if they chose to. But if they do choose to use it, it would still be nice to learn at least the elementary basics and behave responsibly. Just like (I hope) they don't just jump in a car without a license and plough through a school.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Helping kids less fortunate than himself by teaching them how to use a computer. Get local business invovled to donate said unfortunate kids a new computer. Oh, and find out from his parents why the hell they weren't monitoring his internet access, then prosecute them as well.
We punish serial offenders who rape and murder 16 year olds with the death penalty. That's a bit harsh. I'm not saying we let the serial rapist and murderer of 16 year olds live, I'm just suggesting that we let him have a little fun with a spammer before he dies. What's wrong with that?
No, I'm not kidding.
Andy Out!
I doubt you left in protest over taxes, if you're as stupid as your post tells us you are, your departure is more likely to have been for the purpose of avoiding pissed off customers.
Arnold's political understanding is based on whatever his campaign contributors tell him.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I wonder if anyone at CNET remembers being around that age. I did the same thing, with the same script kiddie software when I was 13. My ISP had it's mail servers knocked offline for 4 hours that night as 60,000 or so emails piled up in a school adversary's parent's mailbox. My local dial-up ISP, being rational, simply cut off my parent's account. No other action was taken.
A couple of apology letters from me to the ISP and target later, my parent's dia-up account was restored/reactivated. I learned my lesson and no great harm was done.
By labeling such juvenile pranks as 'spam' people's wrath can be gathered quite easily. The proper distinction between this and the spam most everyone hates, once made, makes even the punishment given out in this case seem too great.
Obviously when one is dealing with objective law very little room can be allowed for context and non-emprically statable variables to influence justice. But in the situations of the type above I believe there is adequete 'wiggle-room' in the statues to allow for case-by-case interpetation. If this can not be done, perhaps it is the statues themselves that need to be reconsidered.
What really needs to happen, and I honestly, sincerely believe this, is every country to just agree on the following punishment for any spammer: Perp gets tied to a chair in a very public place, and perp's family, children (if any) and friends are required to witness. Perp has head smashed in with a hammer repeatedly until death, then invite the crowd to desecrate the corpse in any way they can think of. If done properly, all that will be left is a bloody greasemark, a smashed chair and some shredded rope, and a group of people that won't be spamming any time soon...
Help us build a better map!
Since when is mailbombing spamming? It's just a simple denial-of-service attack on a particular organization's email system.
But I suppose I shouldn't expect more accuracy than "GOOD" and "BAD" from Slashdot (<rant>or the MPAA. WTF is with the whole "Downloading pirated movies is STEALING!!!!!111!!!!1!1" thing?</rant>)
http://outcampaign.org/
Actually, here's one thing that I've noticed that turns off a lot of brains. Otherwise perfectly good and functioning brains too. Greed.
Yep, greed. Wave the prospect of undeserved gains, and large enough gains at that, in front of someone, and you'd be surprised how many people basically get an emergency shutdown of their higher brain levels. Healthy skepticism, critical thinking, even elementary logic fly out the window, as they choose to rather believe in a "reality" where they'll get their big reward.
It doesn't explain "I love you", but you can see this in pyramid schemes, nigerian 419 scams, stock market spam, or market bubbles. (E.g., the dot-com bubble.)
Look at the dot-com bubble, and you see that in full effect. The mirage of riding the train (and soon to be train-wreck) of a dot-com to its peak and make a ton of money by dumping its shares before it goes downhill, caught a lot of people. It kept going well past the point where it was bleeding obvious that 99% of dot-coms invariably go bankrupt. Yet people kept investing in the worst of them, in companies where it was bleeding obvious that the owners have no clue, no plan and blow all the money on pure money-sinks just because they can. The mirage was simply too tempting to resist.
I even personally know two people -- and nice people too, who didn't deserve what they got in the process -- who invested everything they had, and a bunch of borrowed money too, in starting their own dot-com. With no other business plan than "but people will give us hundreds of millions at the IPO, just like they gave Yahoo!!!" It was already during the decline of the dot-com bubble, and it was bleeding obvious already what will happen and how it won't work. But greed clouded their mind -- and the minds of some VC they did find -- to the point where there was no talking them out of it.
What they got out of it? Nowadays they ride the bus to work, because they're so deep in debt that they still can't afford a car.
(And if you feel like chiming in with some variant of "ha ha, poetic justice, they got ruined by their own greed"... normally I'd even aggree, but knowing these people personally I can't help feeling a bit of pity for them.)
Or you can see that in pyramid schemes. In the 90's, as the western world was swept by the dot-com madness, the newly freed Eastern Europe was swept by a wave of pyramid schemes. Not just the chain letter types, but whole companies were formed on the promise of, basically, "Give us your money and we'll give you 5 times as much from the next ones giving us their money." It must have been bleeding obvious to anyone with half a brain that the exponential progression will run out of idiots fast, but the mirage of free money was so great that people chose to believe that surely they'll get theirs riiight before the thing crashes. A lot of people sold their houses, cars, etc, to dump their money into such scams.
Among the consequences of that, IIRC, the revolts in Albania were traceable to such a scam which left an insane percentage of the population poor, homeless and indebted to hell and back. Is it sad, or what?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
you will die in seven days ...
come on this proves he is a kid ...
if you want to give him strict punishment ... ,first reduce the legal age to 16 .....
Just north of the capital city of the 51st state (Wimbledon, London to be precise)
BTW, Wimbledon (where the court is) lies in south London, although Warwickshire (where he lives) is in the Midlands.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
First off, THIS IS NOT SPAM. This is technically a "mail bomb" or "email harassment". All this guy did is set up an automailer and send millions of emails to his former employer, which possibly messed up their email service for a week. If they had proper spam filtering on the mail server, it would have done absolutely nothing.
Secondly, this is his former employer we're talking about. Presumably they fucked him over somehow, which is why he mail bombed them. Where's his compensation? None. Instead, as is typical for teenagers, he gets screwed.
Finally, this is what you get for hiring a minor. I have no problem with saying that companies that exploit child labour might have to deal with a bit of extra crap, like getting mail bombs from rowdy kids. Don't wat to deal with these problems? Don't be so damn cheap.
Sorry, my sympathy for large soulless corporations that exploit children is limited.