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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.""
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.
> He will, in short, learn what it is like to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Oh my God! The next Governor of California will be a 16 year old spammer?
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)
spam filter.. human...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Err...where's his computer located?
Cheers,
Ian
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.
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'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.
We seen this before. Ahnold goes back into the past to kill the mother to eliminate the competition. It's a vicious cycle that never ends.
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
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
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 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....