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.
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!
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,
Because it's using my resources to "speak" without asking me first.
The first amendment does not require me to hold your protest rally in my garden. I may do it, provided I support your case or at least don't care, but the 1st does not require me to surrender my property or my rights to something (in this case, the storage space on a server that I have the right to use) to let someone execute his 1st amendment right.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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,
Well, this guy is making a living out of it. He's seeking spammers, at least the kinds of spammers he can figure out where to send a subpoena.
Unfortunately, those seem to be the comparatively benign spammers. Oh, they're still spammers and I wouldn't shed a single tear if any of them had their faces eaten off by wild dogs. But at least from the article, this isn't the Nigerian princes, or Russians trying to sell you v1@gra. It's the companies who really should be complying with the CAN-SPAM laws so that they "can spam" you. (And the kind that's REALLY easy to filter.)
They're not filling your in-box with millions of spams. That's the other guys, and as far as I can tell this guy isn't doing squat about them. Work for somebody else, but it means that this guy is less interesting than he might appear from a cursory summary.
Your assumptions are flawed. Point of fact the US accounts for fully 80% of spam.http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso
But more so you suggest that to stop spam we transfer fully half of our wealth to other countries? good luck with that one.
First off, it's not like there has to be a single solution. I think by far the biggest problem is that if your email is spammed once, it's spammed forever. Everybody knows opt-outs do not work, making such requests will only make your address ten times as spammed. If I were to redo my mail setup, no one would get to know my real inbox. Every address I'd use would be an alias - yahoo will give you 500 of these for free - and every mailing list and every site that requires email for registration would get their own alias. If one of them is spammed to hell I'll delete that alias and it will all bounce, it's the most effective "opt-out" possible. Bots that would scrape public bug trackers, mailing list archives and such would have little effect as I'd update my subscription details and the old address would go dead. It wouldn't stop the spam industry, but it would prevent it from spamming me. I don't think the idiots that pay money for V!AgR4 can be saved...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
I don't really want people to even be able to contact me anonymously
That may be the most ironic piece of writing I have ever seen here from an AC.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
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
Well, he's winning those court cases, and earns enough money doing so to make a living, so I'm not sure about delusions.
The right to free speech gives you the right to publish your own newspaper, for example. In modern terms, it gives you the right to have your own website. What that right does not do is extend to the taking of property belonging to others to achieve the free speech. You cannot, for example, steal, or demand free usage of, my printing press. Likewise, you cannot demand free use of my web site to do your free speech.
Free speech is not free beer.
So how does this apply to email? Simple. Email functions by using the resources of BOTH the sender and recipient. And it uses more resources of the recipient than the of the sender. The speech part of the spam is what is in question. The real issue is theft of resources belonging to a recipient that did not want to share those resources for this communication.
Basically, the point that needs to get across to people wanting to do marketing is to pay for all the resources used to carry out that marketing. Paying web sites for ad impressions, or paying TV stations for air time, or paying newspapers for ad space, is how this is done. We have tolerated things like postal ads because the cost for the recipient is not that much, because the cost for the sender, being high, manages to limit the amounts. Telephone advertising (e.g. telemarketing), changes that to make it more costly to the recipient. And with the internet, it gets even worse, especially for email, due to the extreme automation spammers can do.
We SHOULD be able to use existing laws against spam. The trouble with that is, it is still hard for judges (and Congress people) to understand enough of the technology to understand that email spam is just as much a theft of resources as is a distributed denial of service attack. Spam is a denial of service. It should be treated as such. The content (the speech part), is immaterial.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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
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
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.
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!
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 became a lawyer specifically to fire a low-orbit ion cannon at spammers.
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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.
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The real problem is that it's not a very profitable plan. Suing viable American companies in an American court means a tolerable chance of actually getting some money out of it. Where would you sue the Russian Mafia? How would you collect if you won?
They'd save the price of a hit man by simply ignoring you.