I get one of those calls every day, like clockwork, on my cell phone. I've pressed the "press 2 to be removed from our list" button with no effect (big surprise).
It's illegal to make sales calls to cellphones. Is there any chance of the FTC actually doing anything about these people?
I got similar results when I tried it. Less than fifty hits, mostly of the same family.
I find it very easy to believe that someone just posted links to photos in their blog or something, which Google would have picked up. No evidence here that Google is crawling the O2 site or that O2 is leaking photos; just that people are deep-linking to it.
What else have you got?
I received mine yesterday. By evening, I found out that the GPS wouldn't lock on unless I used an external antenna. By this morning, users had discovered that the GPS works fine if the memory card is removed, pointing to probably electronic interference behind them. If they don't find a field fix for the problem, I'll have to send mine back because I bought it for the GPS applications that I would write for it.
Another old classic that could be made into an awesome movie: Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
I wouldn't bother with the sequels though. Well maybe the first two or three.
Ahh, well, teach me to apply what I learned in North Dakota to Italy.
In my case in ND, part of the legal standard is how interactive the web site is. I actually had to defend my web site as static content, while Reynolds' lawyer argued that the presence of CGI scripts by definition made the site interactive enough to cause jurisdiction to apply. We also argued about whether a traceroute packet that ended up at a ND server was sufficient "making contact" to create jurisdiction.
Is this Italy you're referring to? It's certainly not true in the U.S. Here, it's up to the whim of the judge, and they almost never award fees. The U.S. court system likes a lawsuit and does not like to discourage them.
In addition, in my case, I won based on jurisdiction (my lawyers assured me it would be far more expensive to fight on the merits). No legal fees for me.
There's a lot more to it than where you're incorporated.
If you do business in Italy, you can be sued there. In fact, the determining factor on whether or not you can be sued in Italy is whether or not an Italian court says you can.
Sadly, you're wrong. Truth will acquit you if you have the money to file the lawsuit, but lawsuits can be financially devastating even if you win. There is no defense against getting sued.
No you don't. Being sued is very very expensive, and the chances of collecting costs from the plaintif are effectively nil. The legal system loves lawsuits because it makes money for lawyers.
I recently spent about a year's salary defending myself against a nuisance suit by a spammer. My co-defendant is still on the hook to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You are wrong. He didn't hack into any servers. He executed zone transfers and sent VRFY and EXPN commands to a mail server in order to prove that Jerry Reynolds was the owner of Sexzilla. That's all he did.
As one of the people involved in this, I think I should take a minute to set the record straight.
Sexzilla was once one of the largest porn spammers on usenet. I wrote about them on my web site. The owner, Jerry Reynolds, sued me for defamation. I asked the other spam-fighters for whatever they had on Sexzilla so I could defend myself.
David Ritz responded with something along the lines of "Oh, it's true alright, here's the dns zone information that proves it." He also published his results on-line.
Reynolds then sued David for an "unauthorized zone transfer".
That zone transfer is the entirety of Reynolds' case against David. The rest of the stuff in the judge's decision was all a bunch of bullshit spoon-fed to the judge by Reynolds. Most of it has nothing to do with the case at hand, and most of it is either untrue or gross distortions of the truth. For example, the "hijacked" computer was an open relay that Ritz used to send one message to Verizon security, proving to them that they had an open relay.
The admin in question is Reynolds' right-hand-man, Bradley Allison. And yes, he really is that stupid. In court, he testified [p.138] under oath that he didn't know what port 25 was, or whether or not you could use telnet to connect to a mail server.
There was no "hijacking". He sent a single message to Verizon security through an open relay to prove to Verizon that their relay was open. Sierra found out about it and told the judge that Ritz had "hijacked" a Verizon server, and the judge believed it.
The judge understood it wrong. Executing a zone transfer is a common diagnostic tool (in this case, used to track down a spammer). The RFCs do NOT restrict this to the owner of the zone, and RFC 1296 specifically addresses this issue.
If you don't count text games on an old type 33 Teletype (Lunar Lander, BattleShip), then for me it was the original Mazewar on the old Imlac PDS terminals back around 1975. It was also the world's first multiplayer game.
My first arcade game was Space Wars the next summer, which cost a quarter.
The article is innacurate. AOL received 600,000 complaints. The complaint rate for spam is very, very low. Normally, it's far less than one in 10,000. Assume it was a whopping 1 in 100 this time. That's 6 million spams.
Unfortunately, if the plaintiff is rich, there's nothing trivial about it. I was on the receiving end of an unfounded defamation case brought by a rich plaintiff once. They can bleed you white under the U.S. legal system before it ever comes to trial.
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I get one of those calls every day, like clockwork, on my cell phone. I've pressed the "press 2 to be removed from our list" button with no effect (big surprise).
It's illegal to make sales calls to cellphones. Is there any chance of the FTC actually doing anything about these people?
Excuse me, did I read that right? 32 meg? I hope that was supposed to be 32k. For 32M, I would expect it to do my taxes as well.
I got similar results when I tried it. Less than fifty hits, mostly of the same family. I find it very easy to believe that someone just posted links to photos in their blog or something, which Google would have picked up. No evidence here that Google is crawling the O2 site or that O2 is leaking photos; just that people are deep-linking to it. What else have you got?
I received mine yesterday. By evening, I found out that the GPS wouldn't lock on unless I used an external antenna. By this morning, users had discovered that the GPS works fine if the memory card is removed, pointing to probably electronic interference behind them. If they don't find a field fix for the problem, I'll have to send mine back because I bought it for the GPS applications that I would write for it.
Another old classic that could be made into an awesome movie: Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I wouldn't bother with the sequels though. Well maybe the first two or three.
I would define censorship as the use of power to suppress information or ideas.
It might not be illegal when Microsoft does it, but it's still censorship.
Survey: Are domain registrars free-speech friendly?
Personally, I prefer Gandi.net; they have an excellent reputation.
In general, it's probably not safe to host a controversial domain or registration within the United States.
Ahh, well, teach me to apply what I learned in North Dakota to Italy.
In my case in ND, part of the legal standard is how interactive the web site is. I actually had to defend my web site as static content, while Reynolds' lawyer argued that the presence of CGI scripts by definition made the site interactive enough to cause jurisdiction to apply. We also argued about whether a traceroute packet that ended up at a ND server was sufficient "making contact" to create jurisdiction.
Is this Italy you're referring to? It's certainly not true in the U.S. Here, it's up to the whim of the judge, and they almost never award fees. The U.S. court system likes a lawsuit and does not like to discourage them.
In addition, in my case, I won based on jurisdiction (my lawyers assured me it would be far more expensive to fight on the merits). No legal fees for me.
There's a lot more to it than where you're incorporated.
If you do business in Italy, you can be sued there. In fact, the determining factor on whether or not you can be sued in Italy is whether or not an Italian court says you can.
Sadly, you're wrong. Truth will acquit you if you have the money to file the lawsuit, but lawsuits can be financially devastating even if you win. There is no defense against getting sued.
No you don't. Being sued is very very expensive, and the chances of collecting costs from the plaintif are effectively nil. The legal system loves lawsuits because it makes money for lawyers.
I recently spent about a year's salary defending myself against a nuisance suit by a spammer. My co-defendant is still on the hook to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I would argue that tracking spam to its source is not an illegal purpose.
You are wrong. He didn't hack into any servers. He executed zone transfers and sent VRFY and EXPN commands to a mail server in order to prove that Jerry Reynolds was the owner of Sexzilla. That's all he did.
As one of the people involved in this, I think I should take a minute to set the record straight.
Sexzilla was once one of the largest porn spammers on usenet. I wrote about them on my web site. The owner, Jerry Reynolds, sued me for defamation. I asked the other spam-fighters for whatever they had on Sexzilla so I could defend myself.
David Ritz responded with something along the lines of "Oh, it's true alright, here's the dns zone information that proves it." He also published his results on-line.
Reynolds then sued David for an "unauthorized zone transfer".
That zone transfer is the entirety of Reynolds' case against David. The rest of the stuff in the judge's decision was all a bunch of bullshit spoon-fed to the judge by Reynolds. Most of it has nothing to do with the case at hand, and most of it is either untrue or gross distortions of the truth. For example, the "hijacked" computer was an open relay that Ritz used to send one message to Verizon security, proving to them that they had an open relay.
You can read the whole sorry saga here.
The admin in question is Reynolds' right-hand-man, Bradley Allison. And yes, he really is that stupid. In court, he testified [p.138] under oath that he didn't know what port 25 was, or whether or not you could use telnet to connect to a mail server.
There was no "hijacking". He sent a single message to Verizon security through an open relay to prove to Verizon that their relay was open. Sierra found out about it and told the judge that Ritz had "hijacked" a Verizon server, and the judge believed it.
Very good summary.
The judge's decision was practically a cut-n-paste from Sierra's original complaint against Ritz. Most of it's just plain bullshit.
The judge understood it wrong. Executing a zone transfer is a common diagnostic tool (in this case, used to track down a spammer). The RFCs do NOT restrict this to the owner of the zone, and RFC 1296 specifically addresses this issue.
If you don't count text games on an old type 33 Teletype (Lunar Lander, BattleShip), then for me it was the original Mazewar on the old Imlac PDS terminals back around 1975. It was also the world's first multiplayer game.
My first arcade game was Space Wars the next summer, which cost a quarter.
Would the person you sold it to happen to live in Fargo? I believe that's who owns it now.
The article is innacurate. AOL received 600,000 complaints. The complaint rate for spam is very, very low. Normally, it's far less than one in 10,000. Assume it was a whopping 1 in 100 this time. That's 6 million spams.
This particular gang sent multiple millions of hard-core porn ads to AOL users. It was more than "a bunch" of spam.
Failure to be meek and obedient is not a crime. He *hadn't* done anything wrong and the police *were* out of line.
Unfortunately, if the plaintiff is rich, there's nothing trivial about it. I was on the receiving end of an unfounded defamation case brought by a rich plaintiff once. They can bleed you white under the U.S. legal system before it ever comes to trial.