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Virginia Spammers Go To Jail, And Pay For It
An anonymous reader writes "A Virginia appeals court has upheld the first felony conviction under a state anti-spam law. In the process, the court also suggested that spam recipients might be able to sue spammers for money damages. According to the court, taxing a person's servers with unwanted e-mails is a form of trespass, little different than intruding on their land or making unwanted use of their private property. Perhaps because of this decision, spammers will soon find themselves on the receiving end of a million dollar class action suit."
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Since registering I can't remember getting a single telemarketing call. I don't think it applies to politicians though, surprise.
Be careful what you wish for. Bulk mailing helps subsidize the current mail system. Without it, either prices would go up or there would be a reduction in service (mail delivery every other day). Remember the USPS is one of the few gov't organizations that supports itself without taxes. All of the bureaucracy and none of the pork.
Yes, "making unwanted use of their property" is a form of trespassing, known as Trespass to chattels, which is a well defined legal concept that has been around for hundreds of years. "Chattel" is the archaic legal term for personal property, in contrast with land or real estate.
Having watched the talks given at the last several years of MIT Spam Conferences, I can safely say that the people involved with drafting Virginia's anti-spam laws and prosecuting this particular spammer have a very good understanding of technology in general, and email in particular. They probably have a better understanding than than the average slashdot user. As horrible as it may be for some geeks to imagine, yes, there are a lot of lawyers that are very smart and can learn very technical stuff.
You seem to have a very fuzzy concept of the internet and protocols. When someone puts a packet out on the net, they are, indeed, knowingly creating a process that will result in the packet ending up on the receiving computer's network port. It may not be the same exact electrons, but that is irrelevant. And, I assure you that AOL owns their servers and they are the ones that received the spam. Yes, customers of AOL rent the mailboxes from them, but AOL still has legal rights to the servers. This is no different than a hotel or apartment owner that rents out rooms/apartments. They still have legal rights to their property.
Not everyone likes the idea of applying the age old concept of Trespass to Chattels to the internet, for example, the EFF sees problems with it. I agree with the EFF on most things, and have contributed money to them, but in the area of spam, they act too much like chicken-little. The Virginia anti-spam law was narrowly taylored and well thought out. It is a shame that it large parts of it have been overridden by the much worse federal CAN-SPAM act.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Another point:
other then forging the headers which in itself id consider a crime (yeah, i own a server), what do you think they are actually using to send the emails ?
Their computers ?
Legitimate servers ?
All those have been blacklisted ages ago.
They hijack machines. These are the same people that hire coders to write trojans, exploits and viruses for profit.
The aquire the machines illegally and are using them without their owners concent for illegal activities.
It is a minor inconvenience
??!! Wtf ?
Dude, have you ever started receving 1000k mails per hour around 12am on a machine that has the physicall limitations to 100k messages an hour ?
Watch your load rise, block entire countrys, find customers that are sending spam, search for wholes in software, clear the queue...
Consider how much time that costs, and how much time have you got before your customers that were on that machine start calling. Then getting refunds because they cant get their email between 11am and 2pm. Moving their accounts to someone with more horsepower. Then talk to your employer about the overtime that you had to spend on teaching sa the new ham and spam, clearing the queue from bounces because they accumulated to an astonishing 1m messages, the books you had to read etc.
Yeah. Minor inconvienience.
Its a drastic example, but it happens (yes, to me).
Not every company can afford to buy a server that handles that kind of load lightly.
Not every company can afford a fulltime admin.
Try freelancing as an admin - they dont call you when its good/bearable/bad - they call when the machine is spammed to its last user.
I couldn't agree with you more about the telemarketer end of the house. I worked for a telemarketing company for approx. 2 years and ran one of their teams. I taught the team about ethics and true marketing and knowing their "target audience". They were not allowed to call at dinner time (5 to 7 pm in whatever time zone they were dialing). I re-worded "prepared scripts" to be less deceptive and to make it easy for the call receiver to know that this was a marketing call. In the end, my marketing team had the highest call-to-sale ratio in the company and had NO complaints lodged against them in the 2 years I ran that team.
On the score of spammers, however, I find myself disagreeing with you. I work for an ISP now. If you had any concept of the amount of money and manpower that is expended in an effort to curtail inbound spam to our customers, you might re-thing your statement. We are currently filtering more than 80000+ spam messages a day at our mail gateways - and STILL some manages to slip through. We have churches and school systems that are our customers (among others). It's not just a fight to stop spam from coming INTO our servers either. We have to closely monitor servers and customers to make sure that one of our CUSTOMERS isn't some spammer in disguise.
Between personnel time, software, and hardware used to fight the in-flux of spam, and the cost of bandwidth that the spam chews up in the course of a day, our small ISP setup could save an average of about 80k to 100K per year if we did not have that as a problem to contend with. Heck, I could hire on another Network Admin for that amount of money.
Just some of the "OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN" perspective for you to consider.