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Porn Spammers Get Five Years Each
PC World is reporting that 'California's Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer of Arizona, have been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison. Both were convicted of conspiracy, money laundering, fraud, and transportation of obscene materials, according to The East Valley Tribune, a newspaper covering the case.' Because sometimes bad things happen to bad people.
So how bout doing something about these Viagra 79% off October emails I get?
This is a case of two idiots who got caught by trying to operate as a legit business. I really cant see this impacting the volume of botnet, spam spewing compromised computers out there...
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
I guess they got what was coming for them.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
We have the death penalty here! Bring'm on down!
I think that is is great that they are in jail, that is two things now that the internet no longer needs. I don't know what else you could really say on this topic, I mean, they did bad stuff and now they go to jail, next story please!
To see a few of my Android apps goto: www.hartwired.com
<Nash> YES!they caught the bastard who made the blaster virus
<Nash> looks like he will be getting 10 yrs max in prison
<DDR4life> serves him right
<DROSS> Someone is soon going to discover how strangely painful the shower hour in prison is
<FiringSquad> He'll probably catch a different type of virus in prison
<LexiusTheGenuis> poor kids virginity is going to the recycle bin
<Sczoyd> cellmates will probably be giving him some rather large uploads
<Antibig> theyll be installing some new hardware in his rectum
<FiringSquad> looks like his unprotected port is going to be probed
<Sczoyd> I hope he doesnt mind other men using his hard drive
<JSP> a roll like him is going to get rolled a lot
<Sczoyd> his prison mates are going to have a lot of fun with their new laptop
<ShinKurro> someone will find out a new way to spread viruses
<Nash> okay, that wasn't really called for.
Its the PMITA prison!
-dirtbag
"In a perfect world, spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra, and are looking for a new relationship."
They should be happy they live in U.S and not in Russia. Where its usually ends in death sentence russian style.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/1745212&from=rss
Here are the details for this case that I found another site: Over nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages, according to court documents. They were paid commissions based on the number of people who accessed the websites via the spam. Kilbride and Schaffer tried to make it seem as if they were sending messages from abroad by logging in to servers in Amsterdam. But those messages originated from Phoenix, prosecutors said. They were also ordered to forfeit $1.3m. So for sending 600,000 spam messages, they were each jailed for five years. The money means little to me since they had it from this spamming but the time in prison, I personally believe is a little harsh. I guess that's what the jury should have and did decide although I find myself not agreeing with jurors as of late in many cases involving my field of study.
My work here is dung.
It's a well-publicized fact that Chuck Norris does not use email. This is the only possible explanation as to why spammers are allowed to live.
Redundancy is good And also good.
What really burns me is when someone rips off like $50 million in a white collar crime and the punishment is like 5 years in jail and a $500k fine. Shit, that's a better deal than working a straight job; better retirement, too.
If these guys feel like they got fucked over here, they should consider what it's like being a spammer in Russia.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
How am I supposed to fine free teen porn on the internet without their emails? You act like there is some massive search engine where I could type in free teen porn and get hundreds of links or something...sad day today
federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison?
since it costs roughly $50k/yr for prisoners, and we have 2 of them at 5 years....Prison is not the answer in this case. For a lot less money we could restrict them to house arrest, monitor their movement to enforce it, and ban them from contact with any personal computer unless needed for their job and approved by the feds. They still are punished, the taxpayers pay a lot less money, and they don't have to go to prison. If they violate that, THEN put them in jail, but I don't see how putting these 2 people, scum though they may be, in prison is really going to help anyone....or deter spamming for that matter. Prison should be for violent or repeat offenders only.
Monstar L
Or future religions will be based on copious proselytization of porn spam.
technical writing / development
It's against the law? Oh right - the Miller Test. As a Canuck, guess I'll have to blot out my anti-bush stickers on my suitcase. Not that I don't like bush - err.. the right kind of bush...not that there's anything wrong with it... or liking it...the right bush... never mind. :)
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
I wish there was a database that I could compare the crime time with...
I'd love to know if the time they will be serving will be equal to 1 gram of crack or cocaine.
lucky for them they are in federal prison.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
MS if you are listening, if you want to beat google in the search engine market, give good "erotic" results. I can find everything I want about linux easily enough, but when I want to download some eh nature images to remind me that there is more then hardware, you get swamped with false results.
Get live search to give proper results for porn, and googles days are numbered.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yeah, and it is my fault if you break in to my house. Hell, if you shoot me clearly I am to blame for not wearing a bullet proof vest.
What is the color of the sky in your world?
MS can be blaimed for bot nets, it can be blamed for lousy security in general, but stopping spam is NOT their task, do you blaim architect of your house for not including a bulk mail destructor in your mailslot?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... says the Constitution. Don't sign them if you don't intend to respect them. And above all, don't expect others to respect them when you violate them daily.
Cue the "give all the v1agra they advertised to their cellmates" jokes...
Slashdot is a pretty cool guy eh posts dupes and doesn't afraid of anything.
...I smell an opportunity. Anyone want to get some private cam action going with those guys? I'll bet videos of them being pounded in the ass by "Bubba" will fetch a pretty penny on the Spamcop and other RBL sites... Not so much sex porn as violence porn.
That's terrible.
And I honestly think this penalty is a bit overboard, and I've never before been in favor of going easier on white collar crime than the courts do.
These guys couldn't have cost anyone that much money with a bunch of spam emails. 5 years is just too much when you're talking about a crime that was basically very much in a grey area until recently and against the existence of which there is a strong argument.
- Who owns/owned the domain(s) that were spamvertised?
- Where were the domains registered?
- Where were the domains hosted?
- Who was involved in the actual porn? Some people are suggesting kiddie porn?
This information can help to determine if other laws were broken, and I'd suspect other laws were. If this operates like the usual internet drug scams that we see all the time, there were likely a large number of domains involved that were spamvertised. If we know where the domain owners were residing, they may also have committed crimes (particularly if they were selling kiddie porn). Similarly, if we can find this, we can see if the registrars that they purchased the domains from may have also been knowingly working with criminals (if they sold many, many, domains that served the same purpose). And did the ISP(s) hosting the domain(s) know what was being done? Who kept the WHOIS records?Likely the scam goes further than just these lame spammers. Whether or not the case will go any further, though, is anyone's guess.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Let's separate porn and spam (I know that sounds odd). Spam is annoying, porn is free speech. Let's not follow the gov't down the path of censorship. After all, censorship is becoming America's favorite past-time. The US gov't (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like America Deceived (book) from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (especially for the internet).
The world seems a little less frightening when you assume victims have some hand in their undoing.
WTC victims are little Eichmanns. She was asking for it. You have to break a few capitalist eggs to make a communist omelette.
that spam was alive and kicking before either Outlook or Thunderbird, right?
I don't really expect our legal system to have a cogent ordering, where worse crimes do more time. The legal code is a hash composed over decades. I'm sure there are plenty of worse crimes given lesser sentences and vice versa.
Which makes it hard to say exactly what "fit" really means. Jail time serves many different purposes: punishment, vengeance, reformation, deterrence, and simply getting them our of our hair. I can't imagine what it means to optimize for all or any of those things.
Personally, I think that a fairly harsh sentence for spam is appropriate because I want very much for people to stop sending it. I don't know if jail time for spammers will actually achieve that, but I'm so frustrated that I'm willing to give it a try.
It looks like they caught these guys extremely early; many spammers are cranking out that many messages in a few minutes. I can only hope that a few of them will do the math and decide to cut it out.
Spammers or not, should we really be celebrating the existence of a crime called "transportation of obscene materials"? That seems a little archaic and irrelevant nowadays...
Five years is not too much? I say it's not enough. Do you have any idea the kind of computing resources individuals and companies alike have had to dedicate to spam filtering? How much is that costing the worldwide economy annually, or just the USA since this is where the crime "occurred"? How much productivity is lost yearly due to people having to delete these pestering messages from their inboxes? How much is lost when we're forced to tighten our filters and legitimate mail gets lost?
These people have been a blight upon the internet since the day they started spamming, and the collective aggravation and productivity loss they've incurred should net them decades in the nearest penitentiary. This is especially true considering this is neither a crime of passion, nor desperation, and can only be accounted for by greed, which IMHO needs to be punished much more harshly than any other instigator of a crime.
I don't want to see anyone convicted of "transportation of obscene materials". Laws like that are arbitrary and ripe for abuse.
They were spammers... throw them in jail!
Whoah whoa whoah... you say they were sending obscene materials?
Sounds like my kind of guy. Case dismissed.
It looks like the internet is the more important thing in your life, or maybe it just is.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
Dude,
If they are still in prison, they aren't excons yet.
No, no, no. We're going to federal POUND ME IN THE ASS prison.
This particular gang sent multiple millions of hard-core porn ads to AOL users. It was more than "a bunch" of spam.
No suckin' the right cocks I guess.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They should've used TOR.
I want them stopped, but honestly - I have to agree with people saying it's too harsh a punishment.
Call me an old geek. I cringe every time I see "cybercrime" of any sort punished in a normal system way.
(not to mention that all the "bad" geeks certainly do help raise the reputation and job availability for the "good" geeks, if you haven't noticed!)
The internet IS important, and it's only becoming more and more important to the world's economy every day. The days in which the internet was just a nerdy thing are long gone!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
5 years hard time eh. *rimshot*
Seagoon: Shut up Eccles!
Eccles: Shut up Eccles!
Don't let something pesky like the first amendment get in the way of corporate economic productivity.
You forgot the "Each"
As much as I hate spammers, I'm a little nervous about the "we have to imprison them, they cost us productivity" argument.
If it's going to be a crime to cause people inconvenience, we're going to have to start locking up a lot of people. If it's going to be a crime to cost corporations money, we're really fucked. Of course, if we were to make it a crime anytime PEOPLE are negatively impacted by the actions of others, then we'll have to ban corporations. Pollution, the negative effects of advertising, too much TV, additives in food, all of these things would have a negative measurable impact on people's well-being that would likely surpass that of spam.
We'll have to EXECUTE cigarette company CEOs. Not for killing people, but for the incredible productivity losses and medical expenses.
This space available.
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us
I would certainly blame the architect for not including a lightning rod in a church steeple. Some disasters may be natural, others may be facilitated by human action, but smart people should take steps to avoid them all, regardless of the cause.
Let's say, continuing in the architectural analogy theme, that in a certain county there are flash floods caused by deforestation. In the old times there were no floods there, because forests absorbed the rain and released the water slowly. When people cut the trees, each rain brought a big surge of water that flooded the lowest parts of that district.
Question: who should we blame for the floods? In this case, Microsoft is, at least, the one who sold out the lumber in the old forests. Perhaps they didn't build the chainsaws, they didn't cut the trees, but they certainly have contributed to the problem. Saying that building levees is not their task, well that's a somewhat arguable statement.
Just spam, that's white collar crime. Selling bogus pills, or just using botnets, again, pretty well-distributed economic impact. Most spammers these days are also into identity theft, via things like keylogging, and boy does that change things. I have no sympathy regarding the asspounding they may receive. Five years is too little. They should be locked up until enough computer generations pass them by that whatever technical skills they had are completely useless.
doing time in the Federal 'Pound me in the ASS' prison?
Filthy bullshit! I published this in my journal on the 13th.
Geeks strike again 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Why would an ex-con be in prison?
It's the most important thing in my life, you insensitive clod!
-Jeff BezosCondemnant quod non intellegunt.
transportation of obscene materials
Gotta love how this country likes to uphold the bill of rights /sarcasm
The threat of such penalties might deter some, but the real serious botnet herders who live beyond extradition won't be impressed. So long as the incentive remains and no enforceable cost applies, the abuse will continue.
Email provides free delivery of infinite messaging, the capacity of which is defined by the recipient's server, and the cost of which is borne entirely by someone else? And message headers are trivially spoofed? And it's chock-full of security holes? And we're surprised that this is abused? These are technology problems, and call for technology solutions.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
Aww, why did they have to go for the porn spammers first! If any spam is less bothersome than other types, its the type that puts a smile on my face and a spring in my... errr, step. If you're going to jail anyone in the wide world of spam, how about going for all those Nigerian princes and the penis pill peddlers first. There's no joy in those emails.
No, but you can reasonably expect the builder to put in locks that work into this mytical house.
Nor should you be expected to understand the mechanics of the locks in order to use them safely.
Those are better analogies.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Slashdot- Spam == Children.
Oh won't someone think of the spam.
I keep hearing that it costs 50k per year to keep someone in jail. Maybe if you figure in all the graft, but otherwise I just don't see it. Maybe some kind of supermax facility might cost that much... But keeping a guy in a cinderblock room and feeding him cafeteria food just isn't that expensive. They don't have a 1 to 1 guard/prisoner ratio, or gold plated bars on the windows. They don't dress the prisoners in the height of fashion.
If it costs more than 10k a year, someone else is committing a crime too.
Ok... the 5,000th Viagra PMITA joke is still funny, but does anyone have more information about TFA's all-too-casual reference to the spammers' attempts to silence a witness, and its major contribution to their sentences? That seems like a too juicy a tidbit to be swept under the rug.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Ridiculous! Cost of doing business in the age of technology! Maybe instead the nerds of the world should make some spam proof technologies rather than filling up prisons for the equivalent of dumping junk mail fliers in your mailbox. How many man hours are wasted by the USPO to sort/deliver that shit? And tax money is spent in the overall operation of the USPO, yet it's still legal! And there is no way solid way to stop it, whereas with spam, you can stop using a computer.
Prison is a HUGE waste of money for someone who hasn't committed a violent act. What's more, this does nothing but lower the threshold for what you can be thrown in the slammer for. I'd much rather violent physical crimes take precedence when it comes to jail space over corporate check books. Boohoo on them I say! Is this guy a "real" threat to society at large? No, simply company piggy banks (and possibly a few gullible. What happened to survival of the fittest?)
I say if they swindle someone, give the poor folk a shot at their assets, then companies. Then put them on probation or something and limit their income and ability to attain wealth or something. This filling up prisons (placing non-violent folk in with psychos at that) is crazy stupid.
No sig for you!!
Tell you wot, though: cigarettes don't actually cause the productivity losses and medical expenses some people think.
...
... uh ... *two*. I'll worry more about the spammers who're getting screwed once I see the roughly 50% of people in prisons, people jailed on drug related offenses (i.e. they made the mistake of sitting at home and getting high instead of drunk, or selling a drug to someone who wanted to sit at home and get high instead of drunk) released and never again replaced by this human gristmill we call the *War* on Citizens of Our Own Country Who Use (Some Irrationally Selected) Drugs.
1) Medical expenses: people who smoke get sick with diseases a few years earlier than people who don't. They just die earlier. They don't get more expensive diseases.
2) When someone dies, they reduce nationwide (or worldwide) *production*, not *productivity*.
However, the medical expenses are being incurred because of a person who is going to put fewer years of productive work in, so
Anyhow, I agree with your point (or at least agree that it needs to be made) that causing inconvenience is not a crime, a crime is causing somebody's property damage *directly* (or taking it from them), or causing damage to another person directly (in a gross manner). It's just that you get to a sticky situation with "directly" and with "gross". Neither of those come anywhere near to applying to drugs or prostitution, though. Hmmm... Maybe our legal system is totally screwed up? Either way, outlawing spam is definitely borderline with regards to how well it conforms to these simple notions about crime which guide the rest of our legal code, which is why I initially said that the five year penalty sounds like too, too much.
Still, there's a much more widespread problem, with *millions* of victims, rather than
Yes, 5 years in prison is not nearly enough.
I say a fine of $725 per spam would be more apporpriate.
What's that? Hmm, 1000 billion trillion spam emails sent per month x $725.00 that'd teach them, we really need to send out a message.
BTW I don't own a copy of The Internet myself, but my wife is a guru, she sends email and everything.
I might agree, but only because of the money laundering and fraud; spam is a minor annoyance. I find billboards and television commercials infinitely more annoying, and they're perfectly legal. At least I can delete spam with minimal effort.
At any rate, I highly doubt these fellows are responsible for all of the spam on the internet, or that they started the trend, so punishing them for the existence of spam filtering is sort of absurd.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
i don't quite get it. i'm sure there are plenty of good messaging services out there; i use gmail - i get no spam (that i have to see, thousands arrive each day in my junk box) so, on that service the spam issue has become a non-issue. is this an aol/msn thing? my corporate account also receives no spam. you can blame people in america for trying to make money in whatever way they may, you can even be puritan and hate the way they make it; but i cannot, as a technologist, celebrate this conviction. i receive 2-10 pieces of junk mail in my us mailbox each day. this is wasteful and even more annoying. and many of these entities seem to have more information about me than they should - information they bought. i am on the "do not solicit in any way lists". so, how is it these people do this each day and there seems to be no recourse - but people sending some electronic messages that can easily be screened, avoided, and cleanly discarded are celebrated when incarcerated? (which imho is horrific punishment.) seems like injustice to me. and i hate spam as much as anyone.
Deterrence does have a limited effect in preventing criminal activity. But, as the last 10,000 or so years of recorded history shows us, it does not prevent all criminal activity. Someone will always truly find a way around being caught, and many others will think that they will not be caught. Their society will pay either way, for the cost of their crime or for the cost of their incarceration/punishment. These delightful fools thought that they would not be caught and scammed away. They are now costs to be paid by the state/taxpayers.
Until we as a species figure out how to prevent crime/greed, we will keep repeating the same actions.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
Spam is a tremendous non-problem. It's one of those ridiculous things that people obsess about for no reason. All email accounts for less than 5% of the total bandwidth usage of the internet. It's a minor issue.
Stop bitching about it, filters take care of it.
Move on.
Wtf? I hate spam as much as the next guy, but the obscene materials charge is definitely a violation of free speech. Miller test be damned. Yelling penis (or something more graphic) in a crowded theater won't harm anyone.
If you know that someone will have a psychotic episode if you yell something specific, then that is closer to yelling fire in a crowded theater. Yelling something in a group of random people without intent to induce psychotic episodes or other kinds of violent reactions shouldn't be a crime, no matter where you live. If parents don't want their kids to see or hear graphic things, though. They live in the real world, and other people shouldn't have to bolster the fantasy land they live in. You wouldn't throw me in jail for telling some little kid Santa doesn't exist would you?
It is impossible to stop a communications medium for being used for advertizing by any technological means. Junk mail has a significant cost for the sender, so it has a natural limit on the amount of crap sent; e-mail, however, has no such natural limit.
I guess mob bosses who don't dirty their own hands don't belong there then, eh ?
Yes. "Spam" is using the communication medium (in this case e-mail) to send an endless stream of advertizements. It clogs up said communication channels, reducing signal to noise ratio, and increasing the chances of a legitimate message being lost. Since it is the communication between individuals which forms the society, spam directly attacks the very foundations of society, and is a very real threat.
There is another, long-term threat: cynicism. The advertizing we are being bombarded with at all times is making us adapt by becoming less and less receptive and likely to believe anything anyone tells us, which could have some extremely nasty implications down the road, since it weakens our ability to cooperate.
Social Darwinism went out of fashion, as bad ideas often do.
What makes you think that a spammer, who is running his operation with total disregard for the trouble and damage he is causing, isn't a psychopath ? Just because you're a psychopath doesn't make you too stupid to control your violent impulses when doing so is beneficent to you, you know.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
...can only be accounted for by greed...
Greed is the prime motivator of your economy that you so valiantly defend above life itself. It is nature in the raw. Your attempts to control it only pervert it. Waiting in line at the DMV, bank, post office, etc and jammed traffic on the freeway are much bigger drains on productivity. Why is no-one calling for the imprisonment of bureaucrats and tailgaters?
What?
I bet these two got caught because they were dealing with porn. The reason they were sentenced is that they offended soccer moms and puritan standards, not that their business was spamming and trying to fool their customers; these are common commercial practices they rarely punish.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
How much time individuals and companies alike dedicate to watching commercials on tv, in journals and on billboards?
For me these are as annoying as spam. And how much does this cost the worldwide economy?
But check how much of this leads to endless linksites that link to link sites that lead to crappy paysites.
This investation of fake sites who get in the way of real results is just most evident when searching for porn.
Just because you find a lot of images through image search doesn't mean they link to anything good, oh sure, your average 12 yr old may be satisfied but as an old guy, my tastes have advanced beyond that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"How many man hours are wasted by the USPO to sort/deliver that shit?" (Referencing snail mail flyers and other junk mail.)
An invalid argument because the senders PAYS to have that junk mail sent. In the case of spam, the recipient and all nodes between it and up to/including the compromised botnet machine that sends the spam are bearing the cost of sending the spam message. The spammer pays nothing, and is stealing resources from others.
That is theft. Theft is a prison-punishable crime.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Read the list of charges, lemming. Skipping over whether the spamming alone would have richly deserved that, there are still charges like money laundering and fraud. And you think that 5 years are too much for _that_?
What do you propose, then? That we let fraud and money laundering run rampant, as we give convicted criminals a gentle slap on the wrist for that? Or maybe even a slap on the wrist is too brutal by your reckoning?
Also, sad to rain some clue upon your bleeding-heart parrade, but:
1. Fraud and money-laundering laws aren't _that_ new. You could get sent to jail for either of them, hundreds of years ago just as well. Or do you consider anything newer than Hammurabi's Code to be too new to enforce?
2. I'm sorry, but there is no grey area about when a law starts to apply. If you want to protest it, lobby your senator. Breaking a law because until recently it wasn't there, is just about the dumbest excuse I've ever heard.
But more importantly:
3. Get this: the aptly named CAN-SPAM law in the USA says just that: you _can_ spam. You're just not allowed to fake the sender (so no joe-jobs), you're supposed to honour opt-out requests, and some other common sense restrictions. So noone yet has been sent to jail for the act of spamming. The closest they got to that, was getting convicted for breaking the other provisions of the law.
That's the crucial bit that the horde of bleeding-heart idiots miss when moaning that any punishment is too high for spamming: noone ever got convicted for spamming. But if you start doing joe-jobs, using botnets, trying to circumvent not only opt-out but people's filters too, and generally be a major asshole to millions of people just because you can... well, then don't expect the rest of us to have any sympathy. If your attitude to the larger community is "you all can kiss my arse, I'll do whatever I want to you because I can", then don't be surprised if the answer is "you can kiss all _our_ arses, because we'll get rid of you and your kind". And if we need a new law for that, we'll make one.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'll gladly call for the imprisonment of tailgaters, but not for the reason you cite.
If somebody walks down the street waving a claw hammer at people and saying "get the f**k out of my way or I'll crush your skull", he'd be locked up. Why is it somehow different when he uses a car as his weapon?
And yes, I keep left (I'm in the UK) except when I'm overtaking.
To keep this on topic: spammers should be made to pay the recipients of their crap for each message that was received. The recipient gets to set the price. Hey, that's what the record companies are allowed to do when someone uploads their tracks, right? Fair's fair...
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
5y is a little too lenient though. Maybe if everyone forwarded their spam to their inboxes in Folsom where they get printed out and forcefed to them, that'd make me and probably a few other people feel a little better.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Five years and over counts as hard time in my book. I'd rather we reserve that for crimes against people, and keep lower punishments the domain of crimes against property.
Regardless of the self-important attitude you display here ("Oooh, he wasted my time! Let's put him away for a decade!"), he did not destroy anyone's life, and thus should not be punished as harshly as those who did.
The fact that it is a cumulative crime is a further reason to *not* punish based on your criterium. They're not the only ones causing you all this aggravation. In fact, any one spammer is usually ignored. It's only when there are dozens of them that it becomes a pain. Do you want to punish the one for the aggravation of the many? Yes, I suppose you would.
Spam and viruses have created a massive industry.
Take a look out Sophos' new HQ in my town. They know how to exploit an exploit.
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4552/136/1600/sophos.jpg
If you're a spammer, don't do it from within the borders of a totalitarian government. Those are rather obscene charges for a mere porn spammer. Five years in American federal prison could turn out to be an Abu Ghraib experience. Our government is deeply evil.
Freedom is free.
It is impossible to stop a communications medium for being used for advertizing by any technological means. Junk mail has a significant cost for the sender, so it has a natural limit on the amount of crap sent; e-mail, however, has no such natural limit.
There is no technological method to eliminate spam, nor natural limit to the amount of e-mail that can be spread? First off, cost of doing business then. If you're going to establish a presence online, you're going to get spammed. Second, if the systems can handle an unlimited amount of e-mail, spammers should be free to send as much as they please right? Oh wait, there is one. The push to eliminate spam, seen from the technological end is to reduce operational costs. From a social perspective, to minimize sheeple from exploitation. Neither of those should be the governments job, IMO.
It can be mitigated technologically, if not outright eliminated. Sure it would cost money to develop or implement those solutions. Far better that option than wittling down the stick to the point where, whenever a businesses profits are impacted, we throw someone in jail.
On the second point, it's up to people to protect themselves rather than relying on a nanny state.
I guess mob bosses who don't dirty their own hands don't belong there then, eh ?
Bit of a stretch to go from a spammer's crimes to those of your average mob boss, who in many cases may order that death/harm come to an actual person.
Yes. "Spam" is using the communication medium (in this case e-mail) to send an endless stream of advertizements. It clogs up said communication channels, reducing signal to noise ratio, and increasing the chances of a legitimate message being lost. Since it is the communication between individuals which forms the society, spam directly attacks the very foundations of society, and is a very real threat.
There is another, long-term threat: cynicism. The advertizing we are being bombarded with at all times is making us adapt by becoming less and less receptive and likely to believe anything anyone tells us, which could have some extremely nasty implications down the road, since it weakens our ability to cooperate.
Clogs communication channels? Fix the system. When something is overburdened, I'd much rather a "better" version be implemented rather than "I don't like how you're using it, so I shall quest to have you imprisoned so you can't do it anymore." Again, it lowers the bar for the future on what you can tossed in the clink for. That is not a good thing.
Bombarded by advertising? Shut off the TV/radio, don't go online. I don't feel there is an intrinsic right that you not be offended or otherwise "put out" by others. If you can't deal with, find a shrink. I'm sure they have ads somewhere. And if people desensitize to it and are more likely to become potential victims, that's their problem. I'd rather not have Big Brother trying to protect everyone.
Social Darwinism went out of fashion, as bad ideas often do.
It would be my opinion that we raise the less fortunate/educated/wise to the level of the upper crust, rather than say "Ok instead, we'll shield you from it and let you continue to simmer and stew in your insecure, uncertain, oblivious view." Especially when you put the power of carrying out that doctrine in the hands of a government.
What makes you think that a spammer, who is running his operation with total disregard for the trouble and damage he is causing, isn't a psychopath ? Just because you're a psychopath doesn't make you too stupid to control your violent impulses when doing so is beneficent to you, you know.
Actually the definition of psychopath is typically defined as someone with real mental instability who CAN'T control impulses to cause harm. Thanks for trying.
The world is fucked up. I get it. What's more fucked up is the "lock em up! that will solve the problem!" attitude. The effort exerted on locking up sp
No sig for you!!
... as much as beating your wife?
... one person died, that's bad. One million people died in Iraq. Oups.
Where did I condone sinking the Rainbow Warrior? Which, btw, was a completely stupid, on top of illegal, operation