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.'"
Yeah, but on the scale of evil bastards, I'd rather spammers get comeuppance than the scientologists. Especially if the spam included DoS attacks, hacking, and bomb threats. For most people, scientology is just a bad joke, but spammers are screwing with the everyday lives of pretty much everyone out there. And one year in jail is not enough disincentive.
Project Chanology has nothing to do with the orchestration of DDoS attacks and harassment attempts with the Church of Scientology.
The members of the small group that decided to perform these attacks did this on their own which caused losts of infighting between Anonymous since performing anything illegal goes against Project Chanology's cause.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
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^Wsect leaders
Where do I send fan mail for this guy?
Anonymous has done a lot since the early days of prank calls and whatnot. The legal protests as well as other actions by Anonymous (also legal) have delivered a crushing and unprecedented blow to Scientology. Anon has probably done more to fuck them over than even the FBI did at the end of the 1970's. Now because of Anon, there is massive negative media coverage of the scilons. Hollywood is rebelling against them and more and more celebs are walking away or saying no. And on top of all that, now the Australian government is taking a hard look at Scientology as a criminal organization with a Senator actually denouncing them in open Parmiment. Anonymous has enabled many ex-scientologists to speak out as well as family of those still inside to seek communication with their loved ones without fear of reprisal. Anonymous enabled this by breaking the back of Scientology's Office of Special Affairs and has them so tied up, they can't prioritize which targets to go after and have lost their effectiveness almost entirely. After nearly 2 years of this, only one conviction against an anon and for a lowly DDOS attack that happened in the early few weeks of the movement is a testament to how good Anonymous is at staying within the law. Sure it may cut out some form of lulz, but we have found that action against the Scientologists that hurts them but leaves us legally untouchable generates way more lulz because it leaves them no lawful recourse against us.
When was the last time you were harassed by a Scientology member?
When one of my University teachers became a scientologist and hijacked the whole class for months to discuss Dianetics as the "new science for management and self-improvement for success in the 21st century".
Problem is that since Scientology is not registered as a religion in my country, the school's heads were not aware of the inappropriateness of her actions and it took over three months of protests from several students for them to find out and sack her.
No sig for the moment.
I don't see request for Tor by default in Ubuntu. What about other distros or other onion routers? That would increase the base. Amnesty or Human Rights Watch or The Democracy Center all have a stake in onion routing. To take the thread in the same direction, but further, the group that backed Bush may have left the top offices in the administration, but it has not entirely left power. And the voting machine problem is not yet solved. Those are still under their sphere of influence.
Phil Zimmermann's Why I Wrote PGP and OpenSSH's SSH FAQ are two works that come to mind first about privacy. Most countries recognize the natural right to peaceable assembly. Do the corporations that now have larger budgets and more political clout than some small countries also those rights? You know the answer. The price of freedom is not just eternal vigilance, the cost also includes acting to proactively resolve threats to that freedom.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Speaking of which, I don't think I've hit a site that's been slashdotted in a long time.. Am I just reading the news too early/late or is this phenomena on the way out?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Actually, as a historian, I see the Bible, at least the Old Testament for what it is, an oral history and moral code system. The creation of the Earth and all that isn't from a guy who herded goats 4,000 years ago, but its the oral tradition of all the peoples in the region, originally probably from Persia or western India. The Deluge myth might even date back to the end of the Ice Age, or at least the flooding of the Persian Gulf area or other megafloods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(prehistoric)
Also, the Bible isn't just a Christian text, its also a Jewish text and is held in regard by Muslims, its just not their book.
You lump bomb threats in with spam and DoS, yet I can't recall any incident in the history of computing where spam or DoS directly caused a person's death.
The core of the matter is there are rampant abuses of civil liberties, and the CoS is a highly visible icon of such abuse. If the CoS is allowed to continue, then we open the door for any and all wacked-out works of fiction to be labeled as "religion", and to benefit from the irrational exclusions and bypasses applied thereto.
Really, what's preventing me from founding the "Church of Spam" and claiming that UCE is protected religion speech ? We could all worship the holy Tomlinson, and each level of (paid) membership would open up access to secret RFCs until one attains "High Daemon" rank, where the subtle intricacies of SMTP are finally revealed.
Seriously man, FUCK Scientology. They deserve everything that's coming to them.
-Billco, Fnarg.com