you forget that in the US you cannot be tried more than once for the same violation. I believe that also applies to the civil courts, hence the existence of class action lawsuits.
sure, but Hotmail wasn't the only mail provider that got hit. There's yahoo, gmail, and countless others. Not to mention the R&D that companies like AOL, Comcast, Ameritech, and SBC have put into pop-up blocking and spam filtering. Then think of all the customers and businesses that have spent hundreds of man-hours in the last year alone wading through spam instead of getting their productive emails in a timely and clean fashion. It's not just MS's money at all. This should have been a class-action lawsuit. I'm glad someone got this guy, even if it is MS, but they should have filed a class-action suit and got others on board. As much competition as there is in software, this is also a community of developers and users - even if half of them hate the other half.
A class-action suit would've gotten more money out of Spitzer AND would have served ALL of the people who've suffered under his business practices.
This is just another PR move by MS. It makes them look good to non-geeks while all of us techies know what's really going on. A bunch of lawsuits aren't going to stop the spread of spam of virii. Sure they may punish the big-bad-wolves of the industry, which is a good thing. But the money won from the defendants (if any) of a lawsuit should go to something like the w3c or the ieee for research and implementation of standards that will serve to prevent spam and the like from being the norm anymore.
I would only agree with MS taking the money if it meant that they were going to put it DIRECTLY into security R&D to patch up their holes.
So those users will be seeing this version in... 2008 maybe. 2012. Right after Longhorn comes out.
I think you're being a little too optimistic about Longhorn
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you forget that in the US you cannot be tried more than once for the same violation. I believe that also applies to the civil courts, hence the existence of class action lawsuits.
sure, but Hotmail wasn't the only mail provider that got hit. There's yahoo, gmail, and countless others. Not to mention the R&D that companies like AOL, Comcast, Ameritech, and SBC have put into pop-up blocking and spam filtering. Then think of all the customers and businesses that have spent hundreds of man-hours in the last year alone wading through spam instead of getting their productive emails in a timely and clean fashion. It's not just MS's money at all. This should have been a class-action lawsuit. I'm glad someone got this guy, even if it is MS, but they should have filed a class-action suit and got others on board. As much competition as there is in software, this is also a community of developers and users - even if half of them hate the other half.
A class-action suit would've gotten more money out of Spitzer AND would have served ALL of the people who've suffered under his business practices.
This is just another PR move by MS. It makes them look good to non-geeks while all of us techies know what's really going on. A bunch of lawsuits aren't going to stop the spread of spam of virii. Sure they may punish the big-bad-wolves of the industry, which is a good thing. But the money won from the defendants (if any) of a lawsuit should go to something like the w3c or the ieee for research and implementation of standards that will serve to prevent spam and the like from being the norm anymore.
I would only agree with MS taking the money if it meant that they were going to put it DIRECTLY into security R&D to patch up their holes.
That being said...DAMN THE MAN!!!!
So those users will be seeing this version in... 2008 maybe. 2012. Right after Longhorn comes out. I think you're being a little too optimistic about Longhorn