Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Finally Under the Legal Gun?
MarkvW writes with this welcome bit of Schadenfreude: "People are finally starting to use the anti-spam laws in the malevolent manner in which they were intended — unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs!" The story's protagonist is my hero for the season.
San Francisco-based Balsam has been wielding a one-man crusade against e-mail marketers he alleges run afoul of federal and state anti-spamming laws...
Wielding a crusade? Really?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
How is this "unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs!"? What I see in this article is a substantial but limited number of lawsuits from one plaintiff.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
To be fair, a one-man crusade is fairly easy to lift.
Does no one here know German? Shame on you.
... now back to the bit mines.
I know a company that has had the fun of dealing with Dan. While I hate spammers as much as the next guy, Dan's little crusade seems less than legal to me. Having a valid opt-out isn't good enough. Here is what you agree to by sending him email (not that you would know it at the time):
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I don't know, "wield" has such a heavy sound, man.
Anybody can do what this guy is doing. It's not particularly hard.
Note that the spammers are settling with him!
It used to be, not as much now, that spammers would scrape web sites to obtain e-mail addresses to spam to.
Terms of use are many times enforceable as a contract.
The simple thing is NOT to SPAM!
Just because the DMA bribed enough congress people to get a law passed to allow it in the USA, specifically to override the California ban on the law, does not mean that it is wanted.
There is more to comply then providing an opt-out link.
Fight Spammers!
Spam is just one of many intrusive and privacy-defeating marketing and revenue-generating practices established during the Internet era.
How about when you visit a site and are greeted by ads that target your past buying and/or surfing behavior? How about a search engine that can instantly summon the date of birth, job history, income, present and past street addresses, phone numbers, and other details given a person's name? How about "slambook" sites that allow people to anonomously post comments about teachers or fellow students? Some would say that such practices are all protected by the laws governing free speech, etc. Then why isn't spam protected under the same principle?
I rarely see a spam message make it through the filters these days. I think this guy is a bit late to the game...
Palm trees and 8
You can't sue a foreign spammer but you can sure as hell spam the domestic company who pays them. Knowingly or not, that should be regarded as breaking the law.
Go after the domestics Mr Dan!
Judging from what happened to Blue Security though, I would be concerned for my safety if the spam cartel unifies against him.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Oops, spam must be on the mind. That should read "you can sure as hell sue the domestic company who pays them".
Although it would it would be funny if every employee of a company that pays a spammer receives a clogged inbox of real spam as part of the settlement. That would be wonderful. I mean, if everybody is reading or filtering spam emails, they company will surely go bust!
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
There is almost no realistic chance of this turning out to anything useful. The spammers you want to go after are in countries where US laws and verdicts have no jurisdiction. You might as well try to shout at your inbox as an anti-spam measure, it would be just as useful.
If you want to actually make a difference in the spam epidemic, you need to address the underlying cause of spam. You need to accept the fact that spammers are not spamming you to piss you off; rather they are spamming you because they make money doing so.
In other words, the only way we will ever stop spam is to address the economic issues behind spam.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
My favorite quote from the article (yeah, I read it):
Still, Balsam settles enough lawsuits and collects enough from judgments to make a living. He has racked up well in excess of $1 million in court judgments and lawsuit settlements with companies accused of sending illegal [sic] spam.
So where can I get my fix my fix of legal spam? Maybe I should wait for election season...
FTFS: "unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs"
Au contraire. You can limit the lawsuits by limiting the amount of spam you send.
What he provides is a DYO template...
This story just emphasizes that litigation doesn't solve anything. How is this 'crusade' actually helping reduce the kind of really atrocious spam that consumes untold CPU cycles, internet bandwidth, and user time? I can't believe that these companies, "large and small," that are actually reachable, are the really troublesome spammers, and not just some more or less well-meaning people who didn't perfectly adhere to CAN-SPAM regulations. So, he's essentially extorting from legitimate companies and groups, rather than doing anything that reduces truly destructive and troublesome spam.
This guy seems like a lawyer's lawyer. He's getting paid by the law without having to actually represent anyone but himself.
I'm surprised I didn't hear about this via email direct marketing!
UNLIMITED RICE PUDDING!
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
The spammers just pass this cost on by raising the price of penis enlargement pills. As always, it's the little guy who pays in the end.
It looks like he's especially trying to catch spammers who are doing business in California, since California laws are tougher than the US CAN-SPAM law. But it sounds like he's also catching people who are violating CAN-SPAM, and any US spammer who can't figure out how to comply with that law cheaply and easily while still spamming their way to Making Money Fa$t is too stupid to deserve to stay in business, and yet many of them don't bother. Obviously non-US spammers don't have to comply with US or California laws, but it's much harder to collect money from them so stopping them is Somebody Else's Problem.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A scummy lawyer sueing scummy email company, nothing to see here.
Please detail exactly how you think the lawyer's actions are scummy. Or are you saying that all lawyers are scummy, just by virtue of being lawyers? In that case, I hope for your sake that you're never sued or accused of a crime, because it might be hard to maintain your self-righteousness when you're relying on those scum to keep you from going bankrupt or to prison.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If he's got the contract on his web pages, and the only way you can find out most of his email addresses you're targeting is by reading his web page, then you're presumed to have read his offer. If you're spamming "dan@danbalsam.com" that may not apply, because that's obvious without looking at his web page, but if you're spamming user34590438509348@danbalsam.com, you got that from his web page.
And maybe that's not a tough enough legal contract to force you to pay him $1000000 and your first-born child, but it should be plenty solid to get $1000 in small claims court.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But i want to see when some sort of huge megacorporation decides to do the same thing this guy is doing, using the "common" methods this kind of corporation does.
Why not?
Why not use the same tricks as the RIAA to sue the originator of the emails as "does 1-1000".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I really think this guy is suffering from delusions of grandeur. His "TOS" is not rational. We can dream of such a scheme, much like we sometimes dream of a lotto win. Beyond that, taking it any further into reality, well, thats into the realms of mental illness.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
The easy half of the game is to have a system for generating lots of aliases - either of the form alias@yourdomain.com (or alias@yourusername.yourisp.net) or yourusername+tag@yourdomain.com are both standard approaches for supporting an infinite number of tagged addresses.
The difficult problem is getting your email user agent to be friendly about making sure that if you got mail from someone who knows you as alias123@yourdomain.com, your replies to them get sent From: alias123@yourdomain.com, and also making sure that if you're sending one mail message to more than one person (either with a mailing list, or separate To:/Cc:/Bcc:, that something appropriate gets done to send them mail with your different addresses. TMDA automates some of that; not sure if anybody's done Thunderbird bits for anything similar.
Unfortunately, part of that solution space is patented - Hall's 1999 "Zoemail" patent and a couple of following patents, though Yahoo has argued in court that they don't apply, at least to whatever Yahoo was doing, and that thy were invalid, obvious, annoying, etc.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have that setup already. Problem is they do automated attacks against domains, so eventually they crack through to your real email. Once they score a hit they sell the live address to other people for their lists. The best you can do is keep it at a dull roar.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm quietly working on that too.
Right now Spam is a "push" mechanism, of something with negative value.
I am working on Converter concepts to suddenly turn spam into something with POSITIVE value.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Legal solutions aren't going to kill all spamming until we acquire Un-bribe-able World-Wide Pork-Product-Hating Overlords. But a large amount of spam actually does come from US-based spammers, including little guys and big businesses. It's extremely easy to comply with CAN-SPAM if you're not a deliberate spammer - don't send people unsolicited commercial email and you've done your job. It's pretty trivial to comply with it even if you *are* a deliberate spammer, and cheap and easy to set up a $100 shell corporation to limit your financial exposure even if you're a deliberate spammer who doesn't want to comply with the trivial rules. If Dan is making money suing you, then you're a) spamming, b) lazy, and probably c) stupid. If your primary problem is c) stupid, then you deserve to be slapped on the wrist with a couple thousand dollars worth of lawsuit and told to stop annoying people. If you're not stupid, just greedy, then you deserve worse, so I'd recommend spamming him lots of times.
Not only do legitimate companies and groups not send people unsolicited email, they maintain mailing list systems that let people unsubscribe, so even if they have spammed you, it's easy to unsubscribe once from all of your future email. Of course, most people have learned not to trust unsubscribe-from-spam systems, because that just gives spammers more data, but if you really are legitimate (e.g. you're a newspaper, somebody registers for your online comments system, and then decides you're sending them too much mail) you'll do that. And if you're legitimate and not stupid, you're certainly not going to buy mailing lists of "opt-in addresses" from untrustworthy sources.
The purpose of the laws that let individual spam victims sue spammers isn't just to let us get recompense for the 5 seconds of time it takes to read through a message that slipped though our spam filters - it's to let large numbers of people take care of the job of prosecuting spammers, since the criminal prosecution system isn't going to bother with the small-timers. The reason for allowing it to be done in small-claims court is to make it much easier for us to to that. And yeah, it does encourage the spamming business to professionalize and let Russian mobsters do the jobs that used to be done by real American workers living in their single-wides chasing "make money fast by spamming" scams, but getting rid of home-grown stupid spammers is an important part of cleaning up the Internet. But it also encourages the anti-spammers to professionalize, and good for them!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"He really seems to be trying to twist things for a buck," said Bennet Kelley, a defense lawyer who has become Balsam's arch nemesis over the years in the rough-and-tumble litigation niche that has sprung up around spam.
The ironing is delicious.
That is what they said about the junk fax laws, if you allow people to sue it will create junk fax trolls. I have not seen that, but instead I saw junk faxes become almost extinct.
Fight Spammers!
Whoosh! Dude, you're missing that we're making fun of TFA's author's bad use of the English language here... It's even in the title of your posts :-)
It used to be easier to track down and collect from spammers a decade ago than it is today, because so much of it has moved to off-shoring and botnets, and spammers have learned to use shell corporations, bogus domain registration information, fly-by-night web hosting services, and other techniques, so the low-hanging fruit is mostly gone. It's especially tough because the easy people to catch are mostly the stupid ones, and they don't usually have a lot of money. Back when people still fell for the "Make Money Fast by Spamming The Internet" scams, usually there were a lot of suckers buying spamming kits, not actually making much money, but it was easier to catch them than the scammers selling the kits. On the other hand, slapping those people on the wrist for a few thousand dollars would usually keep them from getting back in the game..
If Dan's making money at it, good for him. He's probably catching a somewhat more professional class of spammer, but still stupid enough not to be able to avoid violating the anti-spamming laws or build themselves $100 Delaware Corporations to take the rap for their spamming.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Userfriendly.com comic from Aug 7, 1999
Pitr: Am wonderink what is this email
Email: This is not unsolicited bulk email. Buy me. Blah blah blah
...
Pitr: Zlotniks! Sending me spam! Am fixink their leetle red wagon!
...
Boss: What happened to our email server?
Worker: It's flooded. And there's an email here that says "This is not a denial of service attack."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
He's scummy because he doesn't do a damn thing. He sets up honeypots, and then sues the spammers, hoping they settle. It's like the pigs buying up a crackhouse and busting everyone that comes in, but never finding the dealer. Legally right? Yes. Morally? No. Only scum go after the low-hanging fruit.
Any Joe Sixpack moron can go file a lawsuit at small claims court. If he was really interested in making a change, he wouldn't be taking the settlements, he'd be dragging them all through the coals. Instead, he's just a money grabbing slimeball.
Hell, he was just some two-bit marketing droid before he thought "oh kool, getting default judgements is fun, I'll go make myself a loyuh!"
Fuck him. Maybe I'd be OK with him if he was working pro bono to help 419 scam victims or something, but right now, he's just as bad as the assholes on TV that advertise class action lawsuits
I am the bone of my email
Inbox is my body, and filter is my blood
I have vanquish over a million spam
Unknown to s3x
Nor to v!4gr4
Have withstood pain to delete junk
Yet those spam will never stop invading
So i pray, 'Unlimited Mail Works'
This from a lawyer defending clients who are abusing the email system to make lots of bucks? Pot, meet Kettle.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
With e-stamps, people would have to pay a few cents to send you spam (unless you put them on a "friends" list). This would make the cost of mass spamming prohibitive. It would also make tracing abusers easier since money is tracked far better than internet bits. Further, a portion of the stamp cost would go to enforcement.
Table-ized A.I.
By requiring all incoming mail to be either on the user controlled white-list (ie: any user can opt to allow an address such as *@slashdot.com or joe@sixpack.net), or to be linked via our PGP chain of trust we have eliminated all spam.
Signing up for a web service that validates e-mail address? Simple: add that site to the white-list first.
In my company signing our e-mails via our PGP key is essential to prove who wrote what when.
Seriously folks, the solution to SPAM is not yet another awesome filtering algorithm, or futile and expensive legal proceedings; It's verifying the sender is who they say they are. Stop complaining about how unsecured & non-authenticated the unsecured & non-authenticated e-mail protocol is and instead, help us all work towards the solution by adopting/advocating secure & authenticated e-mail.
Why does SPAM exist? Because people are too lazy to force the authentication issue. If everyone digitally signed their e-mail we could say, "filter all mail connected by more than 6 degrees of separation into the junk folder," and the fight against SPAM would be over. IMHO, we shouldn't be fighting against SPAMers, we should be fighting for adoption of authentication.
Exactly. The California law allows for $50 per violation, up to $25,000 per day. The federal law allows for $250 per violation, up to $2,000,000 total. Settling out of court for a few thousand each case means he is not tying up their time, not causing a significant monetary hit, and not bringing any publicity to his cause.
Under California Law, Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5 it is $1,000 per e-mail.
But, there are two things you forget: (1) that there is a cost; and (2) if many people do it, it will bankrupt the people who are advertised by the spam. This threat may convince companies that will hire spammers to think carefully before hiring a spammer.
Fight Spammers!
I have sued foreign spammers.
In 2003, I sued Global Web Promotions for their penis pill enlargement spam. Though Global Web was in Australia, they solicited business from California and caused harm in California.
See Snowney V. Harrah's Entertainment, Inc., 35 Cal. 4th 1054 (2005) (Solicitation of California Residents) , Calder v. Jones, 465 US 783(1984) (Harm directed to California)
I am currently suing a porn organization, the third time, operated by David Szpak and Emmanuel Gurtler for illegal spamming. (See http://barbieslapp.com/spam/axscharge/axscharge.htm) The main companies are all located off-shore, the US companies were mere shells for the offshore companies. These guys hired Yambo (See http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/listing.lasso?file=880) to send spam for them. They created two new companies, just after I sued them the first time, but they claimed it was not to avoid my lawsuit but to avoid the Visa anti-fraud/chargeback detection mechanisms.
Fight Spammers!
First, there is a defense of mistake. Second, it is not against spam, but spam that has a deceptive subject line or header.
Even if you make a mistake in the e-mail address, should be be offering a free TV, that is not really free, to someone who gave you a business card asking to be e-mailed?
The California law outlaws deceptive spam.
Fight Spammers!
He's not my hero, and that with me hating spam with a passion.
What is is doing is picking the low-hanging fruits. The ones you can easily identify and sue. He's suing dating sites and social networking sites for being too aggressive and misleading with their mailings. He's doing squat nothing against the real scourge, which is the the Viagra and penis enlargement and Nigeria scamming.
Yes, I don't like those mailing you get from every site you sign up to all the time, but at least on those the opt-out link usually actually works, and while their marketing department desperately needs a lession on how annoying customers isn't a great way to build a relationship, they're not even in the same league of scumbags as the main flood of spam.
To me, the first guy (or girl) who shoots ten spammers for being spammers is a true hero. And in the courtroom, the guys that take the Spamfords of this world to court. And not to small claims to get a few thousand bucks, but to a real court to shut them down for good.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Wielding and brandishing!
So... where exactly is the heroism? What has he done for the greater good of another individual or for society?
I RTFAed, he just takes the money and move on.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
"rapidshare to find your shit is exactly the same as hopping warez bbses. ... when some idiot courier forgot .c37 and spread a crc or two as well ('cuz, why not?).."
-(-1 offtopic)
More as deep:
Technology does _not_ make life harder.
Bastards do.
http://img.skitch.com/20090802-bjekq45iha8kstyjickwcnsi7i.jpg
(ellipses)(comma)
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/12/26/006254/Apple-Forces-Steve-Jobs-Action-Figure-Off-eBay ... today, alone. Ipso facto (or similar) (full stop).
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/26/1552225/EFF-Offers-an-Introduction-To-Traitorware
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/what-traitorware
Qed (or similar), ipso facto it's not -1 offtopic.
qed.
Defense rests.
Suck my thermos.
I would much rather have a software solution like a spam filter then any law that tries to regulate the internet.
While my company pays for bandwidth and extra space on the servers, it is much more valuable that my legitimate emails containing videos and correspondences get to my clients then the amount I pay for the spam that comes into my network that I block. Email is much cheaper than mailing out CDs and easier then using faxes. Its not a perfect system, but damn near it. i can send an email around the world for the slight increased cost to my local network.
You don't happen to work as a spammer do you? I don't see how any reasonable person could think this is morally wrong.
I also don't see anything morally wrong with your example you gave either however it isn't exactly equal to what this guy is doing since he has evidence.
Everyone's tired of the internet being treated like a toilet (except you it seems) by companies. If this dude can clean it up a little then that's good by me regardless of what reasons he has to do it.
He's scummy because he doesn't do a damn thing. He sets up honeypots, and then sues the spammers, hoping they settle. It's like the pigs buying up a crackhouse and busting everyone that comes in, but never finding the dealer. Legally right? Yes. Morally? No. Only scum go after the low-hanging fruit.
Any Joe Sixpack moron can go file a lawsuit at small claims court. If he was really interested in making a change, he wouldn't be taking the settlements, he'd be dragging them all through the coals. Instead, he's just a money grabbing slimeball.
I don't think anybody who matters is getting hurt here. It's not so much like buying a crack house and arresting the customers. It's more like yelling that you are in need of cocaine and arresting everybody who tries to sell it to you. This is a guy who knows there are people out there looking for victims, and makes himself look like a victim in order to take advantage of them. Only bad guys can be hurt by his scam.
I knew "to wield" only in it's meaning akin to "to pick somehing up with the intend to make use of", as in "to wield a sword". But m-w.com does have a definition of "to wield" that seems to fit the article's use of the word: "to exert one's authority by means of".
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
A large part of the spammers are actually in the US - see any statistics on spam origins.
Be careful with how you interpret the statistics. The numbers often come regarding not the location of the spammer, but the location of the systems that relay the actual spam. And of course, with the vast numbers of enormously vulnerable systems in the US who are left turned on 24/7 on broadband that is not at all surprising.
Finding the location of the spammer is another situation altogether. You need to follow more than just the MX record, you need to follow the money. Look at the WHOIS data on the spamvertised domain and find out who is greasing the wheels. There you will find the international diversity of the current spamming epidemic.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
He became a lawyer specifically to fire a low-orbit ion cannon at spammers.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
If he was really interested in making a change, he wouldn't be taking the settlements, he'd be dragging them all through the coals. Instead, he's just a money grabbing slimeball.
He's sued the holding company running AdultFriendFinder 4 times, and will continue to sue them until they stop spamming. The courts won't award him 1.1 million dollars per violation, unfortunately. Also several are pissed that he drags them through court instead of settling; I haven't determined why he settles some cases and drags others through court. Maybe because he can squeeze them for lawyer fees by dragging the case through court (they do have to pay their legal team), but he doesn't incur any himself beyond initial filing.
They all want to settle because they don't want an injunction against them the twelfth time they land in court with the bastard.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
It's morally wrong because he's being no greater than your average RIAA shill. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but he's not suing these companies to make them stop, he's suing them to get them to settle (so, among other things, a judge can't order them to stop).
While I'll agree that only bad guys can be hurt, he's not hurting them enough. I don't think he even cares to end the spam, just make a quick buck off of it.
If a law firm in the Morrison and Foerster league gets going on this then the PRoSpammer folks are Delta Alpha Echo Delta DEAD.
if this one guy can make a living at this then im sure that a few junior partners could rake in a ton of money for a firm.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Personally, I think we should be dispatching Navy Seal teams to dissuade spammers.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
How about just putting spammers under the gun.
It's morally wrong because he's being no greater than your average RIAA shill. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but he's not suing these companies to make them stop, he's suing them to get them to settle (so, among other things, a judge can't order them to stop).
I tend to agree. I'm not opposed to seeing this kind of suit - after all, the laws were designed to encourage them. But I do think that if his efforts had a meaningful impact then we might be seeing less spam by now. He started this EIGHT YEARS AGO, and other than his income, I'm not seeing what good he's actually done.
In short, 'go for it' = 'yes' while 'hero' = 'no'.
I don't think anybody who matters is getting hurt here...Only bad guys can be hurt by his scam.
Well, bad guys and the customers of those companies that advertise via spam. I'm not advocating that they keep on spamming, but minor monetary damages are likely only to drive up prices, rather than influence actual behavior.
Not that he's doing the wrong thing at all, but he is indeed hurting the people who would otherwise be taking advantage of cheaper prices at the expense of a million spammy inboxes. It's a trade-off.
I will contrast this with an analogy. Hit men do not go around killing people just for fun (well not usually). Somebody first finances their operation. Its the person that puts up the $1.3M for the hit that is the one you want. Just because he didn't say how the target should be taken out is not a indemnification for financing the hit under US law.
This situation should be no different. If the product company does not say to advertise by "legally accepted practices" then they should be accountable for their actions. If they are doing legitimate business in the US then they are bound by US laws and the courts there of. If they do say that they had a contract with the spammer, then they can feel free to take the spammer to court to recoup their own financial losses after their own case is over. They of course DO know who they paid and how to locate them. Other companies will then demand to have a say in how their own ad-message is delivered. Once the word gets out that paying a "spammer" will shut your business down then the source of money financing the spam will dry up. No money, no spam. Simple economics. We are just going after the wrong people. The people paying for the spam are the low hanging fruit, the easiest to track down, and the easiest to modify their behaviour.
Your post advocates a
(x ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
(x ) E-mails from people you don't know
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm no fan of spam but it's not clear to me how spam e-mail uses resources any more than banner ads do. When I visit WashingtonPost.com, I'm there to read news, not see an iPad ad. So the ad is unwanted.
The SWF of the ad is downloaded by my browser over my Internet connection, for which I pay. It's downloaded into my into my RAM and onto my harddrive, for which I paid. And the Flash plugin executing the SWF is using my processor time (i.e. electricity, for which I pay) to do so.
In most cases, I'd guess than an unwanted Flash banner ad actually uses more resources than a spam e-mail, which are usually text (since most e-mail clients now block images by default).
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
But m-w.com does have a definition of "to wield" that seems to fit the article's use of the word: "to exert one's authority by means of".
While the usage in TFA does, strictly speaking, meet that definition as stated by m-w, it still smacks of Thesaurus Syndrome rather than authentic usage. I think m-w listed that def. more to cover cases like "Mao wielded the Red Guards to suppress opposition" or "the hacker wields his 0-day exploits" which are analogs of picking up a sword but can't literally fit under the "to pick something up..." definition. "Launching" or "mounting" a one-man crusade would make far more sense.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Google largely has it figured out. I'm not sure how exactly they do it, but it appears to be a combination of black lists, white lists, bayesian filter and putting any emails that are identical to ones identified by other users as spam into the spam folder unless already whitelisted. The results are pretty impressive, although for best results, you do need to whitelist things from time to time.
What's nice about it is that I rarely get any spam at all into my email account. I think it's less than a fifty or so over the last like 5 years or so.
Just put your own disclaimer that receipt of this email does not constitute any business agreement or contract.
I don't see how you can say he's scummy. If the spammers were following THE LAW they would not be able to be sued.
These companies have massive logs of spammers, but the problem we face is the opt in and Microsoft in particular turn a blind eye as they are spammers themselves. Also they make a lot of money of it.
say no to deep packect inspection <eof>
All cows eat grass!
He's suing them to make money. That causes spammers pain. Spammers will only stop when it's too painful to continue. 1000 more just like Dan would cause a lot of pain to spammers.
If they make a good living out of it, good for them.
That's one of the beauties of a well-crafted law built around capitalism. You can make financial incentives for individual citizens to help the government enforce the laws that it doesn't have the manpower to.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
He's scummy because he doesn't do a damn thing. He sets up honeypots, and then sues the spammers, hoping they settle. ...
So, the IP Troll companies are going to hire him?
Be seeing you...
Sounds about right. If you wanted an entity with which I would compare him, you nailed it. He is, to be honest, slightly better. He doesn't say he's out to protect the innocent email user, he's quite honest that he's out to make money.
He's on my list of moral shitheads, but much farther down than the **AA crowd.