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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.'"
Scientology members complaining about being harassed is like Mormons bitching about missionaries knocking on their doors.
Since when is visiting a website vandalism? This is terrifying! /. could have me arrested for almost 10 years of visiting!
'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.'
Well, that's one way to keep busy.
Sorry, what was the website URL again?
He took it right in the ass. It was beautiful.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/06/1554227
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Information is signal, not noise.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...it's a tax evasion scheme.
Unfortunately someone has to -- if we can't control the flow of noise a bit the Internet will be totally unusable.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
...Never gonna give you up!
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
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.
do you really want the government deciding which is which?
The government doesn't really decide that. We do. We complain, the government investigates. It isn't a proactive measure that the government is taking.
However we could have issues if it grows to something similar to the FCC.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
is not a church.
"So, you're the guy who keeps sending me those male enhancement meds spam huh?"
"No sir, i'm only specialising in female spam, nothing else!"
"Yeah, right! well i'll make an example for the next spammer who dares saying that i need such drugs!"
*drops pants*
"Mommy!"
Legislating against spam has nothing to do with free speech whatsoever. It has everything to do with poisoning the commons. If we, as a society, can enact laws saying it is illegal for a mining company to dump 10,000 litres of cyanide into a river, then we can also enact laws saying it is illegal for Alan Ralsky to dump ten billion rolex spams into the world's routing hardware.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
secularist martyr
you don't fight vile "religions" that zombify and enslave the weak with kind words and cupcakes
this is the way the mafia known as the church of scientology plays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
turn around is fair play
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Freedom of speech implies that the recipient wants to listen.
It does? Then it's not freedom of speech, it's freedom to hear.
Brilliant! You have just created a mechanism by which the government can declare all dissent from its policies "noise" and thus be blocked.
The US Government can do that and already has done so on a number of occasions.
It's about consent, not about content. Spam, by definition, is unsolicited bulk e-mail. The type of content doesn't enter into it, so any concerns about censorship are misplaced.
'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.'
part of me mentally read all of those numbers as 'over 9000'
And if you get caught lying to the tax office about your income, you probably also pull the argument that free speech, as guaranteed by the constitution, also covers lying to the tax office, right?
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that you may (mis-)use any medium to tell your opinion. It just says that you must have the possibility to do so, and to do so in public. It doesn't say you have the right to fill up private mailboxes with it. I reserve the right to decide what I want to have in my(!) mailbox. If you want to tell the world about how great your replica watches are, or how much you like the Democrats or Republicans, you are invited to do on any public channel. But keep it out of my mailbox. It's my mailbox. It is not public.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
it was inevitable that a story about someone the hivemind dislikes has a insensitive joke about prison rape.
and of course, it's also inevitable that we'll have some nimby-pimpby sanctimonious PC jerkwad stating that isn't funny.
"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.'"
They always say that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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.
Lisa McPherson
What prevents Stalin the 2nd from happening in the USA? Have we just been lucky to not have anyone that mean be born here? Are Americans just a better judge of character than the Russians?
I'm not so presumptuous to think that Russia is better at making tyrants than we are, or its people are more predisposed to misjudging politicians.
The difference between everywhere else and the USA is that we wrote down a bunch of rules that the government wasn't allowed to break. That way, when our stupid citizens elected tyrants, those tyrants never had any wind in their sails and we didn't "vanish" millions of people for essentially arbitrary reasons [brown people notwithstanding]
The difference is that our government was designed to put the brakes on itself. So when someone proposes that we give the government power or control to do some act that it didn't previously have the power to do, IMO reasonalbe Americans ought to be concerned.
If we get to the point [assuming you don't think we're there yet] where the political class in this country can do whatever they like, what's to stop them? What prevents Stalin the 2nd from coming to power in the USA? Luck? An educated populace? An insightful press and critical media?
The difference between here and "not here" is that here, we don't beleive Stalin has the right to do what Stalin does, and our laws say so. Let's not be in a hurry to denigrate those who question the relaxation of limits on government power.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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.
It's part of the US's Common Law background. A prison sentence for a felony is longer than one year; it's one of the things that distinguishes a felony from a misdemeanor.
A direct quote from L Con Hubbard: Attack...never defend. Apparently the only way to keep up a teetering "religion" is to attack.
That's a direct quote from me as well, talking about RTS games. Not saying L Ron Hubbard wasn't a douche, just that its common sense and can be applied to pretty much anything...
mediocrity rules, man
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?