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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.""
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.
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.
Actually, this sounds like a death threat to me. Aren't there special punishments for things along those lines?
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.