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Anti-Spam Lawyer Loses Appeal, and His Possessions
Techdirt is reporting that one particularly rabid anti-spam fighter has not only lost his case, but most of his worldly possessions as well. James Gordon tried to set himself up as an ISP to get around the conventions of the CAN SPAM act in order to set up a litigation house designed to sue companies that spam. Unfortunately a judge did not take kindly to this trick and ordered him to pay $110,000 to the firm he was suing, a decision that was not only upheld on appeal but accompanied by some very unkind words trying to shut down litigation mills like his. "But, perhaps even more fascinating is that the guy, James Gordon, didn't just lose the lawsuit, it appears he lost most of his possessions as well. Remember that ruling telling him to pay the $110k to Virtumundo? He refused. The company sent the debt to a collections agency, but told Gordon they'd call off the collections agency if he dropped the appeal. Gordon didn't."
I'm not sure who to be cheering for on this one: the barrator or the spammer. Who should we revile more? Dante reserved the fifth pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell for barrators, but he says nothing at all about spammers.
John
If he had some kind of limited-liability entity that sued, he might have been able to protect his own possessions, just like the patent trolls do by setting up a subsidiary for each group of patents.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
the appeals court came down even harder on the guy for clearly abusing the law, pointing out that he was clearly a professional litigant, and not someone running a real ISP
The spammers are violating the law by spamming. Is protecting your right to not receive spam abusing the law? Is there something illegal about being a professional litigant? I thought we called them lawyers.
He'll be fine. Bruce Wayne will bail him out.
Reading the decision, it is clear that the appeals court was biased.
On the issue of the Washington law preemption, the Court referred to the complaint regarding subject lines and from lines as being "vanity domain names" that were not deceptive. The use of From lines of "Free IPOD" or "Free 50 inch Plasma TV" is deceptive. Just because, after opening the e-mail, and doing whois lookups, that you can determine that it is from Virtumundo, does not mean that the from is deceptive.
The appeals court refused to rule who is an IAS, but said that a well known IAS (ie. Hotmail) does not have to show harm from spam because it is obvious, but a little guy does. The Court went further and said that harm under can-spam can't be the ordinary business expense of carrying e-mail, but one can argue that any mail provider must filter spam and carry spam, therefore there can never be harm from spam, illegal or legal. Any good IAS must provide extra capacity so that if there is spam, they will not crash.
Do you feel sorry for the professional spammers that get harmed by the professional anti-spam litigation service? Of course, if Virtumundo itself in the from line, their spam would have been deleted by most filters.
Fight Spammers!
The anti-spam-fax law allows for individuals to sue for damages and so many people have set up fax lines and started collecting faxes and collecting money. I don't know if that is still going on or not, but I heard some people made it a full-time living.
The CAN SPAM act is another problem in that individuals are not allowed to sue. The ISPs are the ones who are eligible for that. This part of the law needs to change. While allowing individuals to sue might be a bit too much for some litigation-happy individuals to resist, I think it might be fair enough to allow domain holders and mail hosts to sue under the CAN SPAM act. I say this because I own three domains and would be happy to file a legal action or two except for the fact that the amount of spam I receive is pretty low at the moment... and by low, I mean one or two every two or three days. (Thank you greylisting! Say that "it won't work" all you like, but the results speak differently.)
Should setting up shop in order to take advantage of a law against spamming be allowed? HELL YES it should! The opposite is certainly true and acceptable -- for business to have laws written to their advantage. Is the a provision in the CAN SPAM act that says you can't do this? Is there any law, federal or state, that says you can't do this? The bottom line is that someone set up a "honey net" for profit via the judicial system. Perhaps its the perceived abuse of the judicial system that is the issue?
Wait, why is this tagged 'haha'?
If I understood the summary properly, an anti-spammer's life is being ruined by a spammer?
What the hell? Surely this is a bad thing! Coincidentally, virtumondo is a very nasty piece of Windows adware/spyware too!
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Having lost nearly all his worldly possessions James Gordon, rabid anti-spam fighter, managed to keep his prized can-opener for the cans of spam he will be dining on... nom nom non
It can be. Going against people with no regard for the law doesn't give you permission to ignore or misuse the law yourself.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I'm safe then. I'm too lazy to be good sport for the Predators and too full of cigarettes to be delicious for the Aliens.
Why don't the MPAA/RIAA (MAFIAA) get the same treatment as this lawyer? Of course, this is a rhetorical question...
14 years ago I purchased a .com for my last name. I was able to get myFirstName@myLastName.com as my email address. How cool is that. Then the spam started (before good filtering). I was getting 1-2 GB of spam a day. My email file (BSD Unix) was open for write 24/7. I could never connect with my email client to download any emails. I'm not even sure if good filtering would have done any good. My hosting company couldn't figure out how to close the email account without closing the my user account (same name) that ran the web site. I basically had to telnet in and VI the file several times a week to delete everything to keep under my account's disk space quota. Also realize that domains still cost $70/year and hosting wasn't cheap back then either.
Spam can really cost someone money even if they aren't an ISP. I eventually had to change hosting companies just to kill that email address. To this day I can't use that address. Even with modern email filters, enough crap would get through to make it not worth using. I'm now using a gmail account.
For the court to be able to act on this assumption, it needs to make a finding of fact to that effect. Before such a finding of fact can be made, other aspects of the complaint must be evaluated. For example, the plaintiff needs to actually be entitled to pursue the complaint they are making.
So basically, in this case, the law says that to pursue a case against a spammer, the plaintiff must be an ISP. Before the court can decide whether the party being accused is actually spamming, it must determine whether the plaintiff is an ISP. The plaintiff failed that requirement, according to the court, case closed.
This may sound annoying to you in this one case, but really, this needs to be the case, in order for the legal system to throw out bad cases quickly. Read up on standing.
Are you adequate?
Of course, there's the question of the spirit of the law. If you really believe that this guy was setting up the "booby trap" ISP in order to help end the scourge of spam, then the outcome seems harsh. However, if you deem--as the judge apparently did--that he's just in it to make profit and that the people that he entrapped were being sucked into arbitrary litigation, then the outcome will seem quite appropriate.
I'm sorry, but it's exactly the same. If a lawyer can figure out how to use the courts to end the scourge of spam, and profits greatly in the process (by taking the money of the spammers), then I'm all for it.
This would be like a lawyer somehow figuring out how to nab child molesters, and in the process take possession of all their assets and bank accounts. The lawyer might have money as his motive, but if he's getting child molesters off the streets in the process, then that's OK. As long as he doesn't wrongly finger someone who's not really a molester, I don't see the problem.
Lawyers have bills to pay too, and to expect them to do useful work for free, and only get paid when doing scummy work which hurts society overall is ridiculous. I think this particular lawyer had the right idea: use the law to do something good for society (shut down spammers) and profit in the process.
No. A litigant is (in the context used here) a party to a lawsuit, not the attorney representing them.
I actually worked with lawyers a couple jobs ago, and found them to be very likable people in general. They're very pragmatic, they tend to have thick skins, and have a very healthy scepticism about everything. And for the vast majority of them, it's simply a job that interests them, not a vocation that consumes them. They're usually the ultimate realists, and don't kid themselves about what they're doing.
So I'd reverse your ratio there, and say 2% of the lawyers make the other 98% look bad. You just don't hear about the ones putting in regular hours, collecting their paychecks, and going home every night.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Despite the name, entrapment doesn't have to do with being tricked, it has to do with being forced to do something you wouldn't otherwise have done. It's not "I wouldn't have done it if I'd known it was a trap" but "I wouldn't have done it if they didn't have a gun to my head".
One difference that I could see with a cop catching a spammer this way is that the money, if any, wouldn't be going into somebody's pocket.
But let's be honest for a second...policeman routinely act as if they are above the law. People are arrested around the country every day for asking for a badge number or going down to the station and asking for a complaint form. Don't believe me? Think your town is different? Go try it and see.
Sure, you'll get your day in court, but only when a prosecutor's been lined up and a bunch of one-size-fits-all charges have been filed against them. Resisting, interfering, failure to identify, etc.
Because, like a patent troll, Gordon wasn't trying to eliminate spam, he was trying to profit off laws against spam that might allow him to sue--a professional litigant.
"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing at a profit."
Why shouldn't somebody doing a public service get rewarded for it? ... we're the one's footing the bill for the judge who has to oversee it all, and the courtroom and clerks they're using.
Actually, the payer of the "court costs" is footing the bill. That's what court costs are about.
Not many ./ers are capable of understanding that sometimes bad people (Gordon) do good things (fight spam) for the wrong reasons (personal profit) at a cost to us all (tying up the court system).
That's what the court system is FOR: Penalizing the miscreants for their misbehavior in order to deter it and making them pay for their violations of law and/or harm to others. If it's not doing that why bother to have it?
"Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons" is a bogus concept.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The jackass had numerous chances to settle and he just wouldn't do it.
Maybe he has something called PRINCIPLES.
The fly in the ointment is that sometimes the obvious won't peacefully coexist.
Arrow's impossibility theorem
With email, we want some semblance of anonymity, the ability to cold-call (write to someone you've never written to before, who hasn't written to you, either), yet no ability to churn poo in mass quantities.
This is surprisingly difficult to engineer. With voting systems, first past the post is known to have more flaws than average, yet we persist with it on the grounds, I suppose, that people deserve the fruits of their inability to emotionally comprehend a system that works.
Plurality voting system
For simplicity, every alternative system is lumped under the heading "the Italian model". This scares most people more than the mafia.
I was explaining to my sweetie the other day that math is all about spending hours to crack tiny grains of rice. Many of the people who struggle with math get caught up in the manipulations. The big ideas are tiny: positional number system, the digit zero, and challenge-response proof structure (aka calculus).
Let me explain that last one. Continuity was a tough nut to crack. All that infinity, how do you stop? It turns out, you don't actually show that the slope equals a value (that would be stopping, and stopping is verboten), you instead show that error bound can be made arbitrarily small (for any epsilon challenge, a delta response exists). It's a small idea, but essential, and rest of calculus follows directly.
From Arabic numerals
Fibonacci, a mathematician born in the Republic of Pisa who had studied in Bejaia (Bougie), Algeria, promoted the Indian numeral system in Europe with his book Liber Abaci, which was written in 1202
This late date never fails to stun me. So much for the obvious being obvious.
My own proposal, which I contemplated in idle moments some years back but never fully fleshed out, is that we add computational cost to the email syn packet (aka the "cold call"). email messages part of a back and forth exchange could linked cryptographically by any of the methods that prevent hostile packet insertion in e.g. ssh sessions. The details are difficult and exceed my attention span, but it has obviously been done.
The receiving mail host could inspect the incoming message, determine that the packet is a syn packet (not linked within an established exchange) and then decide to impose a computational cost on the sending machine: please factor this product of two large primes, then I will trust you enough to relay this message.
The essential feature is that this functions as challenge response: the imposed cost (product length) can simply scale as a function of how bad the spam problem becomes. If the amortized computational cost imposed exceeds the expected return, the economic incentive to push spam will vanish. It's far easier for the receiving host to generate the prime product than the sending machine to perform the factorization.
There are other asymmetrical math problems if this has some defect. It could equally be solving SETI frames or protein folding, if those have no fatal flaws. (A determination which is best left to specialists.) The size of the prime product challenge could rise and fall in a manner similar to TCP/IP congestion control: if more spam gets through, cost escalates, until the spamholes declare a loss and bugger off again.
The game theoretic proposition from the spammers perspective is this: the receiving hosts can band together to make pushing spam arbitrarily expensive.
Some legit mail (cold call subset) might entail a mail host devoting hours to a factorization challenge. Ideally this computation would be delegated back to the email origin. I'd happily let my system grind for day to authenticate one outb
most of which is the web
Last statistics I saw showed that peer-to-peer file distribution services used over 50% of the Internet bandwidth. That doesn't tell the whole story, however. Something like a bittorrent client or a web server or client uses a tiny amount of CPU power per byte of data transferred compared to a spam filter. One of the big advantages of OpenBSD's spamd is that it's got a very lower overhead per message, so it makes a good first line of defence. Even then, moderately large sites need a powerful machine or two running 24/7 filtering spam. This is where the power usage comes from, not pushing the bits over the network.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I appreciate your listing what you think is a better solution. Why would your editor not whitelist your e-mail address through the Postini Web-based config page? I have not used SpamAssassin for three years now. It does not seem to have changed too much since then. Back then in 2006, I was using SpamAssassin for a medium sized business client. I had it configured with all of the possible options: Using all of the DNSBL lists that were available at the time except for SPEWS and couple of other very aggressive ones, using Razor/Pyzor, Bayesian filtering, extensive whitelists of their customer contacts, and frequent updates to SpamAssassin itself. I went through and configured and tested all of the features and monitored it to make sure that it was working. It never approached the level true positives that we achieved when we switched to Postini. There were lots of false positives too, more than we ever had with Postini. Plus I spent some serious time maintaining SpamAssassin that I no longer needed to spend with Postini. For people with new Postini accounts, I think that it is important to check their Web-based junk mail folder weekly and whitelist any false-positive messages they find. But once you have done that for a couple of months, I find that there are very few false positives after that. I spot check my Postini junk mail folder every two or three months just to make sure there are no false positives that I need to whitelist.