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.'"

Comments

Re:scientology

[thisnamestoolong]

Forget this whole debate about whether or not scientology is a legit religion -- we should instead use this absurdity as a jumping off point in the debate over religion in our society. Is there any particular reason that religion ought to have the protected status that it does? Why are religions even tax exempt in the first place? Why do we feel that it is okay to label children with their parents' religion? These are the sorts of questions we should be asking. I honestly can't see how the dark lord Xenu is any more absurd than a talking snake in a tree, but I do see it as a good sign that people everywhere fully recognize the absurdity of scientology. We simply need to take it one step further.

Re:scientology

[thisnamestoolong]

Even the beliefs of the Young Earthers are more "realistic" than that of Scientology.

Could you please explain how? Christianity is at least as absurd as scientology. The entire premise of the whole thing is absurd beyond words -- the God who created the entire Universe is looking down at us and cares who we fuck? This same god (who apparently loves you) will send you to be tortured for all eternity for the grievous sin of not believing in him? And then he has the balls to pre-program us to sin? After all this, he decides he needs to save us, so he sends himself down to be ritualistically sacrificed in an unimaginably horrific way. Why not just, you know, forgive us? He is all-powerful and all.

You even go so far as to mention Young-Earthers -- the same folks who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that we co-existed with dinosaurs. I am not defending scientology in any way, but it is simply not possible to get more retarded than this. They honestly take the word of a guy who herded goats in the desert 4,000 years ago more seriously than the whole of modern science. To put this in perspective -- if you had never heard of Christianity before, and you just happened to pick up a copy of the Bible, would you really look at it and say "Wow, this sounds legit, it must be the word of God and I should start living my life by it"? I think you (and any other reasonable person) would see it for the load of garbage that it is and throw it in the nearest trash receptacle, lamenting the hours you wasted reading such nonsense. Again, I could blast scientology for the useless drivel that it is as well, but I don't feel that it is at all necessary since everyone here is well aware how silly it is. Christianity, however, is a different story. We need to put all of our thoughts and belief systems under the same microscope. Anything less is intellectual bankruptcy.