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Spam Your Rights Online

AOL Sues Spammers 324

Posted by timothy from the pink-mist dept.
mabu writes "Prompted by what they're reporting as over eight million complaints and the result of over a billion inbound junk e-mails, according to this press release, America Online is now stepping up its battle against spam by initiating five lawsuits against over a dozen companies and individuals. Let's hope this is the beginning of a more aggressive effort on the part of ISPs to prove to their users that they are seriously interested in addressing this issue, and at its source. I've maintained that this has never been a freedom of speech issue. It's more an issue of mail relay hijacking, forging header information, and exploiting third-party networks and resources. Perhaps if more ISPs took action, we might see the backbone providers doing so as well?"
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AOL Sues Spammers More

AOL Sues Spammers

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  • May as well be the first to say it (Score:5, Funny)

    by sssmashy ( 612587 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @09:47PM (#5740987)
    "You've got a summons!"

    • Re:May as well be the first to say it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by k-0s ( 237787 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @09:55PM (#5741049) Homepage
      So they sue spammers (that's good) but spam my postal mail box with CD's and they think it's ok? I'm a little bit confused.
      • So they sue spammers (that's good) but spam my postal mail box with CD's and they think it's ok? I'm a little bit confused.

        Gotta start somewhere. Frankly, I think spam of the email variety is a worse misuse of resources, considering the volume. AOL SHOULD send out their CD's on CDRW media, so like the old days, at least you could reuse it ;)
      • This has been discussed before. You aren't charged for the cost of AOL cd delivery, so it's not the same as spam.

        --matt
        • This has been discussed before. You aren't charged for the cost of AOL cd delivery, so it's not the same as spam.


          I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.
          • I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.

            But you'd pay the same for trash pick up regardless of whether or not you got the AOL CD in the mail.

            You might could argue that if AOL didn't send the CDs to everyone, that then garbage costs might go down a penny or something, but I think that's incredibly farfetched.

          • Instead, the next generation (or their children) will get to deal with the huge piles of plastic waste AOL is generating. At least electronic spam ultimately falls into the bit bucket.

          • I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.

            I can't believe this was modded up to 5. Give me a break, people. You aren't paying extra for trash pickup to deal with the pound or two of junkmail that you get each week.

            On the other hand, AOL is receiving a billion spams per day. They have had to install filtering software to get it down to that level. On top of that, they can honestly come up with a dollar figure of what spam costs them in terms of extra mail servers to handle the load. Thi

            • Re:May as well be the first to say it (Score:4, Insightful)

              by slumos ( 577666 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @03:08AM (#5742278)
              You aren't paying extra for trash pickup to deal with the pound or two of junkmail that you get each week.

              Sure you are. Junk mail is not just close to 100% of my total mail, it's a significant part of my total trash from all sources. Garbage trucks have a finite size, so as the amount of trash each household throws out increases, the only choice is to shrink existing routes and add new ones to compensate.

              When that happens, do you suppose the company:

              • a) allows their bottom line to decrease, or
              • b) raises your rates
              ?
              The worst part is that while AOL has to pay, the spammers don't.

              Huh? It certainly doesn't cost less to send a billion messages than it does to receive a billion messages. I'm sure it costs more.

              If AOL has something to defend against, it's people who sign up, start getting 100 spams for every actual message immediately, and cancel. I happen to believe this is the single largest problem facing Internet penetration in comsumer markets today.

              --- anti-spam and anti-BS.

            • Re:May as well be the first to say it (Score:5, Interesting)

              by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @04:17AM (#5742447) Journal
              I live on a relatively small island (30 miles long and 15 miles wide). Trash is a problem, because we have nowhere to really put it, and it's expensive to export it.

              We will shortly be paying the equivalent of US $160/tonne of trash we throw out. A couple of lbs of junk mail a week _is_ costing us directly as our local town council is thinking of weighing our bins when they collect the trash. Maybe all the physical junk mail I get costs only 16 cents per week to get rid of, but that's more than my current spam-load of 60-odd spams a day costs to get rid of.

              I wish all junk mailers would move to email. I can delete them much more cheaply and easily with automatic filters than physical junk mail. AOL CDs cause a much bigger environmental problem than spam.
      • So they sue spammers (that's good) but spam my postal mail box with CD's and they think it's ok? I'm a little bit confused.

        Last time I checked, all of those CDs came postage paid. Let us know when you get a bunch of AOL CDs that come with postage due. That will be a more accurate analogy to spam.

        • Last time I checked, all of those CDs came postage paid. Let us know when you get a bunch of AOL CDs that come with postage due. That will be a more accurate analogy to spam.


          My trash bill takes a hit from AOL physical spam about as much as our ISP bills take a hit from e-mail spam. Niether is good in my opinion. I'm not going to go broke over it but it is an annoyance.

      • Difference.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:32PM (#5741251) Homepage
        Online spam can't be opted out of, nor is there a cost to the spammer for sending it.

        I think the greater weirdness is how /.ers hate spam, but when AOL fights spam (by blocking netblocks and sueing spammers), most /.ers who are moderated up are against it.

        So which is it? Do we support the largest ISP's action against spam, or do we suck up the spam?

        • Online spam can't be opted out of, nor is there a cost to the spammer for sending it.

          I think the greater weirdness is how /.ers hate spam, but when AOL fights spam (by blocking netblocks and sueing spammers), most /.ers who are moderated up are against it.

          So which is it? Do we support the largest ISP's action against spam, or do we suck up the spam?

          My message says "(which is good)" which means them fighting it is good. It'd be better if they stopped spamming my postal box also.

    • Mabey the editors could use some AOL...

      "You've got dupes!!"
      • Okay, so Slashdot seems to get duplicate stories very often... some of their stuff may not always be newsworthy to everyone and so on... but doesn't it get old to repeatedly criticize them for it?

        Personally, I'm tired of seeing jokes about how fast servers went down after a slashdotting, and how often dupes are posted, and I don't see why people keep modding them up. They're getting almost as old as the stupid Yakov Smirnov jokes.

        Mod me down if you will, but please stop modding these up.

    • Re:May as well be the first to say it (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:35PM (#5741268)
      I think you have to go with the wittier: "You've Got Jail!"
    • "You've got Certified Mail"
    • Sorry, that was said the first time this story was posted [slashdot.org] a couple of hours ago.

      AOL Sues Five Spam Companies
      Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday April 15, @08:15PM
      from the 300-a-day-and-rising dept.
      sugapablo [sugapablo.com] writes "AOL has filed lawsuits against five spamming companies, seeking damages in the millions for unwanted email. As the AP [yahoo.com] reports, AOL hasn't actually figured out who all the defendants are though, filing the lawuits against some "John Does" and attempting to "subpoena service providers and othe

  • I think? [slashdot.org]

  • Arg!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Keebler71 ( 520908 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @09:49PM (#5741002) Journal
    Argh!!!! Who do we hate more?! Spammers or AOL? Thank goodness MS isn't involved in this story or I'd be really perplexed.

    • Re:Arg!!! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by t0ny ( 590331 )
      Im surprised they didnt work MS into the article. It seems like Slashdot could be talking about Cracker Jack, and the fact that they didnt get a good prize is somehow because "Oh, Microsoft is a MONOPOLY"

    • Re:Arg!!! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dynedain ( 141758 )
      Well, I don't mean to add another layer of confusion for you....but the article is a dupe. :)

    • Re:Arg!!! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Trogre ( 513942 )
      I think the official order is something like this (sorted from least evil to most evil):

      1. Intel
      2. AOL
      3. RIAA/MPAA
      4. Spammers
      5. Microsoft

      • Evil Quotient factors (Score:5, Funny)

        by mr. methane ( 593577 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @11:08PM (#5741449) Journal
        Perhaps I can help clarify the method of assigning an EQ (Evil Quotient) to an organization. As on Slashdot, a higher number is generally good.

        CEO has visible body piercings: +1
        Company is profitable: +1 .. for more than two business quarters: -2
        They make something you like: +2 .. but you have to actually pay for it: -3
        CEO denounces another CEO with a 0 EQ: +1
        Company allows wearing of sandals in office: +1
        Company requires workers to actually work: -4
        Company has more than 100 employees: -1
        Board meetings are held in exotic locations: +2 .. specifically, non-extradition countries: -3
        Company changes name after "that incident": -2
        Company makes the most popular products: -4
        Company makes neat stuff you'd never buy: +3

        I'm only hitting the major check-offs here.

      • Re:Arg!!! (Score:4, Funny)

        by Zalgon 26 McGee ( 101431 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @11:12PM (#5741468)
        You left option 6:

        Cowboy Neal

    • Argh!!!! Who do we hate more?! Spammers or AOL? Thank goodness MS isn't involved in this story or I'd be really perplexed.

      If you hate both Spammers and AOL you should happy that they are fighting each other.

      Tor

    • Re:Arg!!! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Guppy06 ( 410832 )
      I'd say spammers. AOL at least gave us Mozilla. That, and you never see anybody on Slashdot cheering a movie made by spammers.

  • Dupe? (Score:2, Informative)

    by headjack ( 574809 )
    Didn't we see this earlier today? [slashdot.org]
    Or are AOL stories like AOL CD's...

  • Dupedy-dupe-dupe! (Score:2, Informative)

    by zmcgrew ( 265718 )
    Dupe!

    Hmm...
    Spam tacos...
    or Spam burgers?

    Duplicate spam burgers! Twins!
    Hahaha!

  • dupalicious (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @09:50PM (#5741012) Homepage Journal
    AOL already has 5 more suits, wow, they're really piling them on, since just earlier today it was reported that they had five initial suits!

  • AOL?! (Score:4, Funny)

    by hobbesmaster ( 592205 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @09:50PM (#5741014)
    Can I sue AOL for spamming me with CDs and floppy disks for the last decade?

  • Update by T (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @09:53PM (#5741031)
    I can predict the future:

    Update: (some future date) by T [monkey.org]: Yes, it's a dupe [slashdot.org].

    • Is it possible to have a little button attached to the story description so that subscribed users seeing the article via "The Mysterious Future" can tag it as a dupe to report it to the editors before it goes live?

      You could restrict it to subscribed users with a certain amount of karma maybe, and require a URL for the earlier story to make it easier to verify.

      Just a thought.

  • Instant Karma.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Go to the previous posting of this article and repost a few of the +5's.
    Instant Karma!!

    I posted as AC now but I bet the first few +5's here will be from me!! HAHAHA

  • backbone (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @09:55PM (#5741051) Homepage Journal
    Perhaps if more ISPs took action, we might see the backbone providers doing so as well?
    Much though I hate spam (I get several hundred a day), I certainly hope you're not proposing that the backbone providers should try to classify or filter traffic. This should be done near the edge of the internet, not in the middle. The risk of misidentification is too high.

  • Finally... (Score:2, Informative)

    by black mariah ( 654971 )
    I like it when companies finally realise they're capable of actually working FOR their customers. And tell me, who here would prefer 500 spam mails a day over 3 AOL discs a week? Nobody? Exactly what I think. AOL's discs provide me with free CD cases and coasters. What is there to complain about? When you're sick of having a half billion coasters you simply give them to your local recreation center to be used as frisbees, or to a nice gun club for skeet shooting practice. Spread the love.

    • Re:Finally... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Dylan Zimmerman ( 607218 )
      I prefer MSN disks. You know, the ones that come in the DVD cases. Of course, AOL's been putting some of their CDs into tins lately. Pretty ritzy stuff.
  • had this story on TV when i woke up almost 14 hours ago...the slashdoters must be slipping...

    of course...as others will/have mentioned...AOL going after spammers???

    to quote a very decent movie "talk about the pot and the fucking kettle..."

    -frozen
    • CNN had this story on TV when i woke up almost 14 hours ago...the slashdoters must be slipping...

      Not at all! Slashdot had this story on the front page almost 14 hours ago too! They just thought it was so important that you needed to see it again.


  • I'm starting to like AOL... *TWO* major anti-spam lawsuits announced... in the same day? Wow! /sarcasm
  • AOL is going to spam them with lawsuits [slashdot.org]!

    Hey why are you looking at me like that!

  • They are not just going after the spammers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @09:59PM (#5741073) Journal
    They going after the people who paid the spammers and not just the spammers themselves.

    If a company pays a spammer and but can risk being sued then they will think twice before paying them to spam. They will look for more ethical ways to advertise their products. This will kill spam dead more then any laws or regulations because it will hit the spammers at their wallets. If they have no customers then they are out of bussiness.

    Even if the spammers get away and forge like hell the FBI or the ISP can just go after the company paying the spammer instead. Nice.

  • oh please oh please (Score:3)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:11PM (#5741138) Homepage Journal
    Let Ralsky be amoung the sued!
  • in case it hasn't sunk in, and I think that is the case with some people, outside slashdot especially,

    The spammers do not have the inalienable right to "send you every piece of garbage they want to", they have the right to voice their opinions or beliefs. In other words anyone out there can feel free to post, publish and advertise all the male enhancement and university diploma ads they would like to on their own website, but they have no right in the least to send those my way to waste my time and resourc

  • Not a dupe (Score:5, Funny)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:11PM (#5741146)
    ...it is a 'parallel post' [slashdot.org].

  • Hold those who host spammers responsible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:12PM (#5741149) Homepage Journal
    Read my journal - the most recent entry [slashdot.org] as of this writing is about my writing to Linux Journal and raising the point that Rackspace (who has been taking out full page ads in LJ) are very spam friendly.

    In my journal, one person responded about her experiences as a Rackspace customer.

    One thing we can do is to make it VERY public that places like Rackspace, Verio, UUNET etc. are unwilling to do anything to enforce their own Terms Of Service against spam. Granted, if you follow the various anti-spamming news groups you will know this, but most PHBs don't follow the anti-spamming newsgroups.

    But if LJ gets flooded with people calling RackedWaste to task, then it is possible that it might catch the eye of potential SpamSpace customers. Who knows? It might even catch the eye of the marketing group at SpamWaste and they might, just might, start pushing to enforce their TOS.

    • Or, Rackspace will look at the checks they're getting from the spammers, including the "look the other way" fee, and will smile happily in their bling-bling cars and hot hookers.

      Point being Rackspace knows about the spam, they're not going to be convinced to care about it. Go after the spammers rather than the ISPs, reduce collateral damage, and make actual progress.

  • Voluntary DDOS on Spammers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rossjudson ( 97786 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:12PM (#5741150) Homepage
    I was noodling around this spam problem and was thinking that maybe somebody who isn't me might write a little program, something that looks like SETI, but isn't...this little sucker allows you to participate in a voluntary DDOS attack on a spammer(s). Said program might verify that the "to be attacked" address was in a known spam database, or something like that. Problems:

    1. How do we know the target of the attack is genuinely a dick?
    2. How do we know we have the _right_ target addresses?
    3. Who initiates the attack? Who terminates it?

    I think those are solvable problems. This doesn't have to be a single mechanism, either.

    We are many. They are few. No spammer/complicitor could withstand a deliberate DDOS that didn't end, and was voluntary.

    A DDOS arms race out there on the internet is something that will happen sooner or later.

    Is this illegal? Hey, we are just sending them a few bytes of information. They can just hit the delete key if they don't want it.

    Please beat up this idea. I'm sure it's been posted before. :)
    • P.S. The AOL client would make a hell of a DDOS'er.
    • Is this illegal?

      Illegal is so many ways I can't count them (IANAL but I read /., which is better) And its some other not good things too.

      It is an attack to deprive them of $$. Its a conspiracy because you are working in tandum with others. Its taking justice into your own hands when it isn't warranted. Its ineffectual. It affects other resources on the internet, which is why you are mad at him to start with, making it hypocritical. Since spam isn't illegal per se yet (and it should be) it is quazi/
      • Illegal is so many ways I can't count them (IANAL but I read /., which is better)

        Maybe you should try and count them.

        It is an attack to deprive them of $$

        So what.

        Its a conspiracy because you are working in tandum with others

        Do I have the right to ping or attempt to identify the source of an email sent to me? Can I automate this process? What if I can send a spam email to a central server, and in response, it gives me an address on the internet that I can probe to get more information. My litt

      • Nonsense.

        They're on the internet. Normal tcp/ip traffic from a number of hosts should be no hassle to them - if they don't want it, unplug.

        How about a small monitoring program that just pings once a minute to make sure that their host server is alive? It would be a service to them , as a token of our appreciation for all the informative emails they've been sending to us.

        We *need* to do this , because *so* many people would miss out on their *important* products and services if their server failed!!!

        And
    • From the Book of Illiad... [userfriendly.org][userfriendly.org]

    • I think I've got a better (more ironic) variant. Have an automated tool that replies (to the right address, which of course needs to be found) and says I'm interested in [insert product name extracted from message]. Not only would that DDOS them, but it would also make it impossible for them to distinguish the replies from "victims" from the rest.

      Of course, there's still the problem of identifying the target and making sure we don't cause problems to 3rd parties. Maybe the solution could be to maintain a s

  • slashdot has sued itself over spamming their main page with dupes of stories.

  • Some Way? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aspjunkie ( 265714 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:14PM (#5741159) Homepage
    Would there be some good way to have people identify dupes? Maybe a link on every article [Report Dupe], and then maybe based on some sort of calculation of their karma + quality of their past moderation + the number of those who click on 'Report Dupe', that the story gets a 'Dupe Rating' and can then be filtered automatically for those who have 'ignore dupes past this threshold' selected in what stories they see?

    How difficult might that be to implement?
    Any discussion on something like that?
    I dunno, just a thought..
    • While I agree that your idea contains a substantial technical merit worthy of discussion I would like to propose a simpler, and perhaps less error prone method. In this method (patent pending) I propose that the editors of slashdot remove the crack pipe from their mouth and attempt to remember what they did five (5) minutes ago. Unlike my father, who has a glial blastoma tumor, and has a significant portion of his brain removed, the average slashdot editor should have a short term recall better than say,
    • Would there be some good way to have people identify dupes?

      Nothing like a complex, time-consuming technical implementation to solve a problem that a little bit of editorial competence might otherwise solve :)

      Of course, my current theory is that the editors simply dupe those articles which they believe are really, really important.

    • I'd guess that 90% of the dupes would be eliminated if Slash could scan prior stories for occurances of the URL(s) in the current story and report this to the editor before he/she posts. I mentioned this years ago, it got modded up, and nothing ever became of it.

  • If AOL can sue spammers... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:21PM (#5741201) Homepage Journal

    Can we sue Taco & crew for posting duplicate stories? I wasted 5 minutes of time on this article. My time is billed at $100/hr. Taco owes me $8.33

  • ...ten zillion "free" AOLSummons CDs clogging up spammers' mailboxes and stuffed in their magazines. All AOL has to do is what they know best...

  • From the not likely dept... (Score:3, Informative)

    by wo1verin3 ( 473094 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:42PM (#5741302) Homepage
    >>Perhaps if more ISPs took action, we might see
    >>the backbone providers doing so as well?"

    Not likely since backbone providers bill the ISP based on the amount of traffic, traffic = $$$ as far as the backbone provider is concerned.
  • Oh well...at least this time it uses the little pig icon, instead of the AOL icon, so it's not a complete dupe of another story that is still on the fucking front page.

    Question: how fucking hard would it be for Slashdot editors to at least read the current front page before posting stories????.

    Idiots.

  • AOL is suing a Norton spammer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:49PM (#5741332) Homepage Journal
    One of the defendants would appear to be one of the myriad pirated Norton/Symantec spammers (George Moore, Maryland Internet Marketing of Maryland, and 14 of their advertising affiliates. Spam Content: software products (www.getnortonhere.net))

    Question: could/would Symantec join in this suit, or better still bring copyright violation and (ahem)piracy charges against this fool?

    I have long held the belief that Symantec does not more aggressively crack down on all the Norton spammers because once somebody has purchased an unauthorized copy of Norton, they will have to pay Symantec for updates. Thus, Symantec makes money on the subscription fees and doesn't have to mess around with actually making a disk, printing a manual, etc.
    • Question: could/would Symantec join in this suit, or better still bring copyright violation and (ahem)piracy charges against this fool?

      I thought that these Norton disks were actually old OEM ones (ie, real disks, originally bundled, or intended to be bundled) with PCs. That's not piracy, if it were you can be sure Symantec would have gone after them for that long ago.

    • could/would Symantec join in this suit

      They filed their own suit [google.com], on the same day by coincidence. Not a good day in the life of George Moore. Poor poor spammer.

  • 8 Million? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Jim_Hawkins ( 649847 )
    8 million complaints, huh? Well now...I have a problem with that number. As many of you may know, AOL counts ANY type of signup to their service as an official member. (This is how they have 10 billion members...or whatever it is.) They even keep cancelled accounts! ...so...based on that logic...

    8 Million Complaints (as reported by AOL)
    - 1 Million Complaints being submitted twice (because AOLers barely know what they are doing)
    - 1 Million E-mails sent 'cause 13 year old males like to see if they

    • Re:8 Million? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Dynedain ( 141758 )
      I haven't used AOL since '97...but my parents still have my account open, and the stupid mail icon that appears on Trillian really pisses me off....

      anyways, where i was going with this....the last time i went to the web-based email for my screenname to delete the spam...there was a button to "report spam"...just click it, it blocks the sender's address, deletes the mail, and forwards it to AOLs spam department. I assume they have a similar feature in the full client app. Considering how much spam my AOL ac

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @10:54PM (#5741362)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Bad Bad Bad (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dagmar d'Surreal ( 5939 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @03:31AM (#5742335) Journal
      My goodness, I hate to say it but you've got a rather slippery slope going here.

      Most backbone providers DO currently take action against spammers, although some more than others. Typically this does not involve anything so delicate as filtering for spam traffic, but outright cutting the wankers off the network which is far more likely to be effective. I've actually been party to one incident where a phone call to a backbone provider at an opportune moment made a spammer, his ISP, and their ISP disappear off the face of the net with the perfectly reasonable assumption that a complete lack of packets makes news about neglected portions of an AUP travel fastest. The major problem with whacking spammers is the same with killing cockroaches with a shoe. Smash 10 and there's 100 more hiding under the cupboards waiting for the lights to go out. ...and by the time enough evidence has been gathered for a provider to order one of their downstreamers "Stop that twit or ELSE", the spammer has usually gotten a contract with another facility. ...plus, in case you haven't noticed, a whole fsckton of spam is now coming through overseas servers for companies operating domestically. When was the last time you tried to get a spammer run out of anything operating in China or Korea? Peering points between nations aren't so easily severed, nor would it be useful to do something so coarsely grained.

      The approach AOL is taking is actually rather likely to be effective. Most of these spammers are sketchy little fly-by-nights and LLCs that even suing into oblivion wouldn't stop. The day after filing bankruptcy for their previous name, they'll just reincorporate in a different office with a different name for a cost less than the money they'd make for one spamming job. The majority of the small businesses paying for advertising on the other hand need a little more fiscal momentum than a 3U rack rental to survive. Make it clear to them that there's a good chance some mega-corp is liable to sue them crosseyed if they make use of a spammer for advertising, and suddenly they'll get a lot more choosy about who they do business with.

      However, in case you haven't noticed...

      "(b) The legislature, judicary, and executive branches of government coupled with industry and useful idiot consumers will require that traffic also be screened for other "bad data" - terrorist materials, copyrighted works, anti-American speech, evidence of criminal activity, financial data, medical data, and much more, and..." ...has already occurred. The FBI has been monitoring NNTP, SMTP, IRC, and HTTP activity at major peering points across the nation for over a year now.

      and:

      "(c) the banning of encryption as we know it, since the conscentious masses will turn to it for day-to-day traffic, which will be politically unacceptable to those in power." ...the political "unacceptability" has been the case for quite some time. The only reason the terrorism boojum hasn't caused it to be made explicitly illegal is that there are definite free speech issues preventing such from happening. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard the "kidnappers use crypto" argument, I don't think I'd need a job.

      However, give it another ten years by which time failing to reduce the spam problem through civil measures will be likely to have actually encouraged people to call for government intervention, and then you'll see non-escrowed strong cryptography start to become explicitly illegal for domestic use--in the interests of preventing terrorism, of course.
    • Most people who want the backbone providers to "do something" about spam don't want the backbone providers to filter.

      They want the backbone providers to pull the plug on the mainsleaze spammers directly connected to them.

      They want the backbone providers to insist that the Tier-(N+1:N>=1) providers to enforce their TOS. Failing that, they want the backbone providers to pull the plug on those who support spamming.

  • A recent Slashdot article, "Super-DMCA" Outlaws Ph.D. Thesis [slashdot.org], references a change to Michigan law [michiganlegislature.org] which outlaws any effort to "... Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service." Since (a) SMTP is a telecommunications service and (b) a large proportion of Spam/UCE headers are forged in an effort to hide their source, (c) let's route all the world's SMTP mail through servers located in Michigan.
  • must be another glitch in the matrix.......

    agent smith, STOP kicking the story generating server!!! And feed the Timonthy battery while your at it, i think its getting grumpy.

  • I thought on Tuesdays we were supposed to hate AOL, and love the little ISPs.

    Did somebody change the /. calendar again on me?

  • Reminder to Timothy: You need to remember to logout of your terminal when you leave your desk (or at least lock your screen); otherwise CmdrTaco will post Dupes from your account.

    BTW: The Secret Service will probably be giving you a call in the morning also... Taco CC'd all of us on your message to The President.

  • ...it's an encore performance

  • Legit Mass Mail Getting Screwed (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I run a company that has about 100,000 users and sends out (generally monthly) emails to large groups of those users. Unfortunately, many of these members must forget that they opted into our service when they signed up, or decide they don't want to receive mail... but instead on clicking on the unsubscribe link, they flag it as "SPAM" in their spam filter (or as bulk mail in yahoo, etc). So our ISP ends up getting these automatically generated and sent reports that say we are sending out spam to all thes

    • Re:Legit Mass Mail Getting Screwed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by !Squalus ( 258239 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @01:15AM (#5741952) Homepage
      Well, there is also the problem that a lot of us receive email from companies that CLAIM exactly what you are claiming - that we somehow signed on for their crap when we did not ever do that at all. So if you want to see a real difference in legitimate business email - then by God, poilce your own. I don't know of one of those "Unsubscribe" email links I would ever hit, because then the spam meisters would simply tag that as a legitimate e-mail address. SO you see, it's your own industry's damn fault for causing us all the unnecessary bandwidth hogging, lost productivity and other garbafge we don't want. I am so friggin' tired of the SPAM promoters eating up bandwidth and ISP's saying - "it ain't my fault" - that I would rather see a few SPAMMERS be strung up than have to deal with it everyday. Maybe then they might stop sending me the stupid pr0n, drugs, and mortgage emails. I don't need their stinking cable descramblers or stupid SystemWorks either and I sure as hell don't need no damn DRM enabled e-books either. SPAMMERS deserve to be sent up into space in the first "sun refueling rockets". It is their moral duty to burn. Sorry, I just don't see any legitimate way you can expect anyone to want to hit an unsubscribe link - people know that those lists are then sold to SPAMMERS. Get a new business maybe?

  • Freedom of WHAT ??? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AftanGustur ( 7715 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @03:01AM (#5742247) Homepage


    Has anyone realy seriously claimed that SPAM was a freedom of speech issue ?
    That's rediculeus...

    With Spam, nobody gives his concent except the Spammer.. Claiming that Spam is a "Freedom of speech" issue is like claiming that Rape is a "Freedom of Sex" issue ..

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