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Botnet Spammer Gets Just 18 Months For Being Odd
itwbennett writes "Thirty-three-year old Scottsman Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan campaign in 2006. The reason for his relatively light sentence? He apparently wasn't seeking to maximize profit like any normal, red-blooded hacker. Also, his timing was good. His arrest in June 2006 predated by a matter of months the Police and Justice Act, which would likely have resulted in a harsher sentence. By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison."
There's nary a court in the world that can outsmart a greased Scotsman!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How long does a year last in your world?
Questioning the suspect only cost $5
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Take a look at his crimes without the veil of judgment. He did some pretty neato stuff.
He found a way to run his code on a huge number of computers without the owners knowing at all.
He learned how to control the PC cameras of those computers and had "eyes" everywhere.
He ran this all from his mom's tiny little living room.
He's a modern-day phracker. He's doing stuff that is way out there, taking over peoples' PCs, controlling their systems, and he did it all for the love of technology. If he was alive 30 years ago, he'd have been whistling into the handset receivers of payphones to get free long distance from Ma Bell.
Yes, we need to condemn him because he crossed the line. Genius should be tempered with good sense, and it looks like he got carried away with what he *could* do and didn't contemplate hard enough on what he *shouldn't* do. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. His heart is in the right place. What he needs is better guidance.
Who took down numerous big name websites, was sentenced to eight months of "open custody," one year of probation, restricted use of the Internet, and a small fine.
Lets face it, you can't properly gauge the sentence with the crime - too many other factors come into play that the judges are supposed to try and account for. Intent, remorse, etc etc - all play factors.
He carried out the crimes from a PC in his mother's living room
Basement living room?
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Thirty-three-year old Scottsman Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan campaign in 2006.... By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison.
Matthew Anderson and David Kernell live, committed their offences and were tried in different countries to one another. Why on earth would you expect their sentences to be comparable?
Next.. libel laws in England harsher than in the US! Owners of internet gambling sites that are lawful in other countries face imprisonment in US! Producing the same drug can get you anywhere from a governement contract to a stern warning to imprisonment to execution depending on which country you pick. Hello, welcome to the world.
... perhaps they need to get laid more often.
There is spam for that!
It's spelled 'Scotsman', not 'Scottsman'.
A little proof-reading wouldn't go amiss.
"Thirty-three-year (1) old Scottsman (2) Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week (3) to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan (4) campaign in 2006. The reason for his relatively light sentence? He apparently wasn't seeking to maximize profit like any normal, red-blooded hacker. Also, his timing was good (5). His arrest in June 2006 predated (6) by a matter of months the Police and Justice Act, which would likely have resulted in a harsher sentence. By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison."
Let's play match the errors to the numbers, kids!
* Imaginary country
* Split infinitive
* Partial sentence
* Missing hyphen, implications of being a predator
* Oh, look! That hyphen reappeared
And my personal favourite:
* Hilarious capitalisation making it sound as though protagonist is leading an actual historical faction
Spammer Gets Just 18 Months For Being Odd
In Scotland, you can go to jail for being odd?
I guess an odd Scotsman would be one who doesn't wear a skirt, throw telephone poles for no particular reason, pick drunken fights with cows and trees or eat stuff that most people would rather throw away.
is that the profit motive is evil.
Commit some act to maximize profit, get a harsh sentence. Commit exactly the same act without profit motive, get a light sentence.
If the profit motive adds N months to a sentence for some act, then by the most straightforward, linear morality arithmetic, this means that simply having a profit motive in the absence of committing any act is in and of itself a crime punishable by N months.
Nice communist values there.
"As this case shows, criminals can't hide online and are being held to account for their actions. A complex investigation like this demonstrates what international cooperation can achieve," said Detective Constable Bob Burls of the UK Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), neatly ignoring the fact that few online criminals are ever caught and it has taken over four years to sentence Anderson.
What you've described is a normal Scotsman. An odd Scotsman wouldn't wear anything below the waist at all-not even trousers, be on the receiving end of a tossed telephone pole for no particular reason, deliver Glaswegian kisses to cows and trees while sober, and not only would refuse to eat anything that didn't already have sheep, potatoes, turnips, or sod in it, he'd also refrain from alcohol in all its forms. Nor would he know how to play golf.
In retrospect, it's probably the total abstainment from alcohol that would mark a Scotsman as being 'odd'. Everything else would probably get overlooked or forgiven.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I know it's bad manners to reply to your own post, but since my original post is rated flamebait even though it was meant completely seriously I'd really like to know now from someone here why people hate spam so much. I'm getting perhaps 20-100 spam mails a day and never had any problems with them, they are filtered out very neatly by my spam filter. Some of these mails are even funny and the viruses they contain never work on my old Mac or on my linux box. That people can go to prison for sending spam is beyond my comprehension ever since the corresponding laws were invented.
What's so wrong with spam? Bandwith usage? By that token, anyone who ever used bittorrent would need to go to prison for 180 years. Oh well, there goes my karma... ;-)
Kernell was the victim of a political hit job, this guy ran a botnet that resulted in no profit.
Wide difference.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As a practical, personal matter, I'm not particularly bothered by spam either. But try to estimate the total amount of resources that go into creating, transmitting, filtering and storing all the spam that has ever been sent. I have no idea what the answer is, but surely those resources would have been put to better use solving other problems?
Does it bother you when a stoplight is red for 30 seconds longer than it should be? It only costs you a few seconds of time, and a few drops of gas, each commute... I think it's equally reasonable to be bothered by both of these things.
Is he from Scottland? Oh dear, Google maps tells me there's no such place!
My web domain.
I've seen lot's of your post's before. Seems to me your smarter than that AND you've never been responsible for a mail server. Rather than Bittorrent, in which I pay my provider for access and bandwidth AND voluntarily access at my choosing. It is almost, but not quite entirely unlike junk snail mail. At least the carrier is getting paid by the spammer in that case.
On the main theme, what puzzles me is that lot's of people still don't get two things: 1. 8 out of 10 people you meet are smarter than you. 2. Computer "crimes" are very costly and not really worth it. My router is open, if you access my stuff unlawfully and my honeypot catches you AND I am in a bad mood that day, YOU ARE GOING TO JAIL. So I have to ask all those uber-hackers out there do you feel lucky, punk?
.. he replied "I dinna come forward because in this country, it makes you look like a pervert -- but _every_ single Scottish person does it!"
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They have this view that, when it comes to computers, if they CAN do something, as in it is technically possible for them to do it, that makes it ok to do and means it ought to be legal. Breaking in to a system that has a weak password or lacks a security fix is fine in their view because that person is "stupid" and "deserves it". Of course none of them would be ok with someone breaking in to their house, even though like basically everyone they live in houses with known security vulnerabilities.
Hence why they are ok with a guy like this. They are ok with someone who breaks in to others' systems and abuses them because their ego says that only stupid people can be victims and the victims deserve it.
It is a sadly common view on this site.
I know the spammer got off lightly by comparison because he attacked more than one and a half computers and accounts... still, in the summary it would be honest to use consistent units - 18 months, 12 months.
I think in this case the issue is people are upset he illegally gained control over other people's computers and used them to send the SPAM. It's the hacking / cracking / botnet component of this case that got him jail time, not the actual contents of the emails sent.
So with that in mind, spammers do actually do a fair amount of damage. It's not just bandwidth being chewed - it's the theft of other people's property to send their spam, which in turn gets other people's mail servers blacklisted (like ISPs for example) by SPAMHAUS and the like, which causes completely other people still, who are unrelated, to not be able to do business (just because they used the same ISP to send email) and so on and so on...
Of course spam and other computer crimes are "no big deal" if you view every computer network in the same way you view a home PC... but they're not all home PCs.
Only about 3-5% of email worldwide traffic is not spam. This is a huge waste of resources.