Slashdot Mirror
Prison Terms For Spammer Ralsky, Scientology DoS Attacker
tsu doh nimh writes "Alan Ralsky, the 64-year-old dubbed the 'Godfather of Spam,' was sentenced to 51 months in prison on Monday, the Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports. According to anti-spam group Spamhaus.org, Ralsky has been spamming since at least 1997, using dozens of aliases and tens of thousands of 'zombies' or hacked PCs to relay junk e-mail. Also sentenced — to 40 months in jail — was Ralsky's 48-year-old son-in-law, Scott K. Bradley, and two other men named last year in a 41-count indictment for wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering and violations of the CAN-SPAM Act."
And eldavojohn writes "19-year-old Dmitriy Guzner, Anonymous member and Scientology DDoS attacker, received one year and one day in jail for his admitted crime. His sentence could have been a maximum ten years. According to the Church of Scientology, Anonymous has harassed and attacked them with '8,139 threatening phone calls, 3.6 million e-mails, 141 million hits on its website, ten acts of vandalism against its property, 22 bomb threats, and eight death threats against Church leaders.'"
...it's a tax evasion scheme.
Brilliant! You have just created a mechanism by which the government can declare all dissent from its policies "noise" and thus be blocked.
Back in the USSR, they used to respond with dissent by calling it the result of mental illness. After all, the dictatorship of the proletariat always had the best interests of the common folk at heart. If you disagreed with its policies, it must be because you are a poor suffering victim of some kind of anti-social personality disorder.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
When you do it with the attempt to stop the server... That is vandalism. Slashdot having a lot of people who want to read the content is not vandalism it is not having the correct server capacity. As always the difference is intent.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
is not a church.
Personality disorders, like, extreme anti-government paranoia? Or confusing basic regulations for Stalinist policies?
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Spamming doesn't ruin lives.
Freedom of speech implies that the recipient wants to listen.
It does? Then it's not freedom of speech, it's freedom to hear.
When I woke up today and used the internet.
Scientology was the first organization I am aware of that successfully forced an internet anonymous email service to dig up and disclose information about its clients. All over copyright claims. I am referring to anon.penet.fi, the famous anonymous remailer we all used in the 90s.
In the early days when nobody cared about what "we" did with the internet, we knew that for every asshole that was up to serious evil, there were 10 smart guys who didn't care what your deal was, but hated assholes and could route around them. There were jackasses, but technology always beats jackasses.
Then the law came, and all of that got a lot harder.
Today we have the ability to make "highly" anonymous network connections but we rely on a small group of very VERY dedicated people to make that possible.. [people with the wherewithal to run TOR exit nodes, for instance].
Those entities [be they CoS or rotten governments] who want to destroy free speech must not be tolerated by us.
I remember my senior year of college when I got a takedown-letter about hosting DeCSS. And you know what? I folded, because I had a good job lined up that required I _not_ be a felon. Freedom of speech lost a little bit and I helped give it away, because a warm bed and a normal life are more convenient than principles and freedom.
Our enemies know that, and they attack the weakest of us not to get rid of one or two, but because of the chilling effect it has on the rest of us. No one can escape the law forever, and thus the law, which is supposed to protect the freedom of one man from the encroachments of another, is used as their tool for enslaving us to their desires.
I'm a fallible man and most of us are. That doesn't mean we don't deserve to hate the entites that continue to attack us by perverting the institutions we designed to protect ourselves.
I congratulate the "moralfags" [as they are called within anonymous] who are fighting back. Sometimes, it comes at a high cost, like with this guy.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Just FYI for those who don't have the time or inclination to decipher 'Anonymous' and '/b/'s sarcastic parody insider language: Anonymous is not a "group" in the traditional sense. Nobody "joins" Anonymous. Everybody who feels like doing a prank is a member of Anonymous for the moment they are doing the prank and they are not as soon as the prank is done. Anonymous has no consensus or agreement on their goals or motives. Nobody can request action on behalf of Anonymous ("Anonymous is not your personal army").
More than anything else "Anonymous" is a term or meme that describes the mob effect that occurs in response to shared outrage or shared giggles. In this way it is not entirely unlike Slashdot. It is ridiculous when someone says 'Slashdot believes this' or 'Slashdot agrees with that'.
It is grossly unfair for Guzner to get the blame for over 9,000 phone calls and the rest as a "member of Anonymous". Nobody is a member of Anonymous, and everyone is a member of Anonymous.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
AFAIK CoS isn't kidnapping unwilling people and forcing them to become members, so it's kind of Darwinian in principle.
No, but as soon as you join they can kidnap you.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That's cool, I'm going to come knock on your door for the next three years. The knocking is just a bit of a nuisance and since you've done your part and locked me out all is well right?
Somehow I feel that if I did that I would be looking at a solution that comes from the point of a government gun.
It wasn't the CoS that was on trial. I've been on a jury that felt that the "victim" of a crime should have got time too, but that didn't change our conviction that the accused had committed the crime so we had to return a guilty verdict.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
If the law refuses to step in and do justice, then it falls to the people to pick up the slack.
Just because the government wants to play the role of Chamberlain does not mean Hitler should not be opposed.
Scientology is a patently evil organization and should be opposed by any and all means.
I do not see Anonymous as heroes, I see them as ordinary people doing what needs to be done.
Correct.
And because I've never died, I also do not carry life insurance of any kind.
Because I've never been raped, I don't pay attention to my surroundings or the people nearby.
Because I've never been hit by another car, I don't wear a seatbelt.
Of course, everything I said above is false.
Even though none of those things have happened to me, they've happened to other people who _are like me_. And as a result, I've modified my behavior and in some cases suffered a monetary loss.
This is what is known as a "chilling effect". A great tragedy befalls a handful of individuals, but all individuals realize it could have just as easily have been them. This causes massive behavioral change on a wide scale.
This is exactly the pscyhology used by terrorism, infact. The goal of terrorists isn't to kill all people or even certain people -- it's to kill enough people to effect behaviorial change on a large popupation.
The goal of Scientology [and the RIAA, and other agents of censorship that have the power of the state behind them] is similar. They know they can't get everyone or even most people. But they don't have to -- getting a few people now and then will persuade many others into changing their behavior.
I haven't done a detailed study, but everytime there is a CoS article on slashdot, a LOT of the comments are posted by Anonymous Coward. Why is that? Why are people unafraid to openly criticize the catholic church -- often with blatantly vulgar remarks, and yet so few are willing to do the same against the CoS?
Fear. Fear is the difference. If the CoS wants to rule its own members via fear, that is lamentable and a great reason not to associate with the CoS. But the CoS wants to rule non-members and specifically CoS antagonists via Fear as well.
I don't think it is unreasonable to despise an organization that has already engaged in activities designed to control me via Fear.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
When has our government actually ever given us a new right instead of taking them away? When have they taken useless or wrongheaded laws off the books instead of just throwing more of them out there? Maybe a bureaucracy that became useless that the government shut down? No. The government gets bigger and more intrusive. That is not a crazy conspiracy. It is just the facts. That is what the US government dose. It is what all governments do till threatened by their own people.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?