Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Fined A$5.5 million
Mick Bailey writes "A Perth company and it's director have been issued a A$5.5 million (approx. US$4 million) fine for breaching anti-spam laws. Australian IT watchers may be familiar with the director, Robert Mansfield — he's been personally fined A$1 million for the offenses. The Company, Clarity1, sent 280 million unsolicited emails of which 74 million hit mailboxes between 4/2004 and 4/2006."
I prefer to see jail time for these guys.
www.jmagar.com
-
Coming up next: Spammer gets US court to order australia to stop interfering with his business, and tries to get them to order Icann to remove the .au TLD.
The original court decision was handed down last April; this is the punishment. Additionally, when the case went to court in 2005, the courts handed Clarity1 an an injunction against sending more spam. So it sounds like Mansfield first violated the law, then violated a court injunction.
I wonder if he can pay the fine in e-mail promotion services?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I sort of read that "Fined A$$ Million" ala fined out the ass... *sigh*
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
A fine for these guys is too easy. They should serve some sort of hard time, like in a prison or penal colony. Or imagine exiling them to a whole continent set aside to imprison them.... Oh wait.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Can someone please post his email? I'd like to send him some great money saving offers.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
And no, your pen15 will never get larger. You're a slashdotter who throws Japanese into sentences at random. It's not even going to matter. Get used to it.
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Spam laws should mandate 1 second of jail time for every spam message sent. That's a half to a third of the time the average spam wastes for me.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If some activists get some action from the credit card companies, phone companies and FBI and set up honeypot phone numbers, bank account, credit card numbers to trap the spammers at the point where they try to cash in, that would be nice.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So in other slashdot news people get jail time for hosting torrents which impact a limited number of people/business.
Yet, only fines for impacting a HUGE number of people/business??
I bet that makes them depressed.
Perhaps they should seek out some Net-based therapy.
Maybe they need to subscribe to mailing lists for d1a2ep@m.
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Global warming is a cube.
You are assuming they went to High School in the first place :-)
My other post is +5, Interesting
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WTF? I bet they were sending that much in less than one day:
10k zombie hosts * average 0.1 successful sents per sec * 3600 * 24 = 86.4 million emails sent in 24h.
That's an in-joke in our office after we watched particularly dodgy anime. So, no, I'm not a slashdotter who 'throws Japanese into sentences at random'. I was stuck for a title so I just chucked it on.
Oh, and I'll be sure to relay your pessimism regarding my sexual prospects to my boyfriend.
P.S. Your screen name is paraphrased from a sci-fi film. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
To me it looks like an A$5 load of cash and then some.
Strange, the article mentions nothing about grammar.nazi.org.
Were they indicted, also?
I have to admit that the number of emails surprised me. 74 million just doesn't seem like that much for a 2 year period. I'm not a spammer, but it just seems like they couldn't have been maxing out their pipe. I dunno. The spam business model confuses me a bit, anyway, but really, if I have a list of addresses that is, say, 1 million large (seems reasonable from what I've heard) that means they only send out 74 iterations over the span of 730 days. That's like less than one iteration a week. Does it take a week to push out a million simple text messages? What do they do for the other 9 days?
I'm not trying to learn the craft of "spammery" or whatever, it's just that the numbers seemed low. I guess I just had this impression that they sent out like a million a day or something.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
A few stingray barbs to the heart and they'll think twice about spamming.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
I actually run a service which sends out opted-in newsletters for a number of clients. The average newsletter contains text, links, and some graphics, and is about 50K bytes. I regularly do runs of more than 1,000,000 emails. Based on what I know of it, 1,000,000 50K average messages can be sent in under 5 days by one server.
That server BTW is a P4 2.4GHz running LAMP with a dedicated 1.5Mbps pipe.
If I'm not mistaken, the editor was quoting something someone else said. They can't "quote" a reader if they edit what he wrote...the information was posted for ITS content, not ITS proper form.
You are mistaken. RTFA:
Yes, because it would obviously be impossible to do both. Why should someone who's pulling down a salary as an editor actually have to edit?
Pay attention before you post such a response.
...from the Slashdot post, NOT the article itself (There was nothing wrong with the "its" in the article). The Slashdot editors don't need to edit a user submission, even if the user mistyped something from the original article.
You said it. The editors should take more responsibility for the lede in general, but getting it grammatically correct would be a fine first step. That, and maybe add "sed 's/supercede/supersede/g'" to the posting script.
/. to literate people while it practically promotes illiteracy.
It's hard to recommend
It's WAYNE Mansfield. "Robert" is his middle name. I was one of the people who lodged a complaint and appeared as a witness in the case. The ACMA press release on the matter is a pretty good resource. I have a blog entry on the subject which is short and to the point, and has useful links to other resources (like the ACMA press release).
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Yes, editors DO need to edit submissions. I actually am an editor in real life, if I let crap like that get past me I'd be out of a job.
I've seen plenty of grammatically incorrect user submissions posted on the front page...figured Slashdot editors didn't seem to care about simple things like this and, given the context and purpose of Slashdot, shouldn't really be a big deal. If it were for something in print, or meant for a different audience (or actually the article itself that messed up), it would be a different story (as is the case with your work as an editor).
:-(
I don't think they let it "get past" them, I just don't believe this is the biggest thing on their plates. And still I see no admission that your original reply was off-base, just another reply (and on another tangent).
I also think this entire conversation has gotten horribly off-topic (as the mod noted).
I hardly think bandwidth usage is the primary reason people are getting convicted. torrent hosting usually involves copyright infringement, which is why they get nailed harder
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Out of curiosity, how come, when someone pleads guilty to copyright violation and gets sentenced with 5 months everybody complains that he didn't commit a "real crime" where anyone was harmed, yet finds it perfectly ok that a spammer gets fined such an exorbitant amount?
Simple: the spammer is directly costing millions of people real time and money, and raking in huge piles of cash as a result. Many of us are responsible for maintaining mail servers and have to deal with complaints from end users about spam that the filtering software we've worked so hard to configure failed to block. Also, we're not sure about this case, but the fine might be less than the amount he made, so the spammer would still come out ahead.
The copyright infringer may be depriving a record label (and to a lesser extent the artist) of potential revenue that it's possible they might have gotten otherwise, maybe. Nobody is profiting financially (although some people are listening to music they wouldn't have otherwise gotten to listen to without paying for it).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Surprised nobody else caught this.
A$5.5 Million.
Ass.s Million.
Sure it's a potty joke in l337 speak, which is why it surprises me that on a site of geeks we all missed it.
Maybe he should get m0n1t0r en1arg3m3nt pi115.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
I'm actually a huge anime fan. And I'm a big dork about it. And I do throw in random Japanese words in conversation (mostly with other anime geeks). I never insult someone with the intent of making them feel bad.
My name actually came from a flash animation someone made of me on a forum (my name is Donnie).But yeah, sorry that I didn't make it clear that I wasn't trying to offend you.
And yes, I realize this is offtopic. Mods, mod me down.
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Obviously they don't care. You want to give them a pass. I don't. There's nothing I can do to change their minds, but I refuse to endorse this unprofessional attitude. They get paid to edit, it's not a hobby. Proofing a dozen paragraphs of text a day is not a great burden.
And still I see no admission that your original reply was off-base
I don't understand what you mean. If you were implying that it was correct to quote the submitter's misquote, I disagree. For one thing it reflects unfairly on the original article, which is why I quoted that. For another it's an editor's job to catch mistakes like that before they are published. Slashdot editors routinely mess around with submissions when the mood takes them, so thay have no "hands-off" policy to hide behind. I've seen numerous comments by people complaining how their submission was messed up.
You have a six digit UID, and are still here - and slashdot has been this bad, if not worse for nearly a decade now. There are more important things in life than bitching about an apostrophe in the contraction of it is...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
No.
There are more important things in life than bitching about an apostrophe in the contraction of it is...
90% of the posts here are or of similar, or less, significance.
Your response does not take into account: /.
( ) You're a bit uptight
(X) Tasteless jokes are common on
Additionally you should:
(X) Grow a sense of humor.
(X) Quit writing such long trollish posts.
(X) Have a nice day.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.