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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.""
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.
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..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.
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
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'
If you RTFA or even the summary instead of just the headline you would see he was not really spamming in the sense you are talking about. He email bombed someone for revenge. Seems more akin to a DoS attack on the email server than spamming.
Working at McDonald's.
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
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!
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 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.
They did. It was successfully apprehended a while back.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They should give him free subscriptions to the top ten MMOG's but only allow him a dialup internet connection.
Actually, this sounds like a death threat to me. Aren't there special punishments for things along those lines?
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.
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.
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
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
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
"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!
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.
Really? Wow! You have discovered something incredible no one else has ever noticed before! What other great abilities do you have!?
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
.. 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?
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.
Sounds like we had similar rooms; I had a 13" b/w tv, a stereo (complete with 8 track recorder), two computers (TI994A and CoCo) and the obligatory Atari, and of course all my books, so I tended to stay in my room most of the time. My dad once told me to go to my room then he said,
:)
"Wait! That's no punishment. Go to MY room!"
Man, that was two boring hours....
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
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.
Go fuck yourself retard.
As I said, he's not perfect, but he understands that Californina needs businesses to survive in order for the state to survive.
Davis was sitting on his fund raising thumb too much to actually do anything to Enron.
We got fucked. By Davis. By Enron. By everybody who had a hand in it.
Sure Arnold should have gone after Enron, and he doesn't have the balls to do it. Just like everybody else. Were we better off with Davis? No way. Are we better off with Arnold? A little. He's still a politician, and he'll continue to cater to the almighty dollar, but he at least has a tiny clue. That tiny clue was way bigger than the one Davis had.
I may have raised the IQ of California when I left, but I also took $100,000 a year business with me. And a house. And a $600 a year vehicle registration. And another car, and two motorcycles, and plenty of sales tax, income tax, and property tax revenue. I left behind an employee who's now on unemployment. California is so much better off chasing out legitimate businesses and leaving the ignorant, unemployed, uninsured, non-licensed people to suck even more welfare, food stamps, and your taxes out of the people. Good going!
Next time you need your house needs some work, make sure you go to Home Depot and hire a guy with no license or insurance.
Cheers!