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Privacy Communications The Internet Government The Courts News

Spam King Pleads Guilty in Seattle 152

Posted by Zonk from the why-would-you-want-to-be-king-of-that dept.
arbitraryaardvark writes "The Seattle Times reports that spammer Robert Soloway has pled guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion, in exchange for the state dropping multiple counts of identify theft. 'The electronic-mail fraud charge is punishable by up to five years in prison. The tax charge is a misdemeanor and carries a maximum one-year sentence. The law also allows for fines against Soloway and his business of up to $625,000 on all charges. Both sides agreed to let U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman determine not just the amount of prison time Soloway, 28, might serve but also the number of his victims, the size of any fine and the amount of restitution he may be ordered to pay.' We've previously discussed his arrest and mention in the New Yorker. The wire fraud felony count is based on selling $500 packages to wannabe spammers."
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Spam King Pleads Guilty in Seattle More

Spam King Pleads Guilty in Seattle

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  • Why would they drop the charges of identity theft and charge him with sending too much email? Who cares if someone spams, SMTP is an open system and it's designed to indiscriminately deliver messages- CAN-SPAM is a terrible idea. If you don't want spam, just don't accept email from every mail server on the internet. ID theft and tax evasion are the real charges here.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by arbitraryaardvark ( 845916 )
        Anyone know what the evidence was regarding the ID theft?

        I don't actually. But TFA mentioned how the Washington ID theft statute had never been used in that way before. In my original draft of the summary I described the ID charges as "iffy".
        The deal is for potentially a lot of jail time. Fines and restitution don't matter much because he's sheltered all his assets after having gotten sued by Microsoft. 90% of criminal charges are resolved with plea bargains, and that usually involves dropping most charges

    • Re:For sending too much email? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thyrf ( 1059934 ) on Saturday March 15, 2008 @11:55PM (#22763150)
      That's all fair and well if you're only expecting email from certain servers, but for most of us a deny-by-all service doesn't cut it.
      • Well that's SMTP's fault. I guess it's useful to have a totally open point of contact, but hold your nose when you jump in because you shouldn't expect anything but the dregs of the internet. It's absurd to expect anything else if you leave it wide open.

        • Re:For sending too much email? (Score:5, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16, 2008 @01:28AM (#22763466)
          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
          ( ) 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
          ( ) 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
          (X) 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
          (X) huge existing software investment in smtp
          (X) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
          (X) 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
          ( ) 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) botnets

          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
          (X) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
          ( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
          ( ) blacklists suck
          ( ) 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!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by olman ( 127310 )
            I think I do have a solution to spam.

            It goes simply like this - As the spam volumes keep on climbing and climbing and ever-decreasing volume of email is actually legitimate, "huge investment in SMTP infrastructure" becomes slowly more of a liability than asset.

            You already need heavy-duty spam filtering SOMEWHERE to be able to use business email. I just realized some of my colleagues "just hit delete" on something like 50 emails per day because they lack the know-how to make simple thunderbird/outlook filter

          • Publish your public key along with your email address, require that any message sent to you be encrypted with the public key, and then delete any incoming messag which isn't. Use whitelists for mailing lists and such, preferably based on cryptographic signature verification to avoid source spoofing.

            So, how does this fail ?

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by frdmfghtr ( 603968 )

              So, how does this fail ?

              It fails because your Aunt Mathilda doesn't know the first thing about email encryption, nor does she care. Businesses won't mandate its use with the buying public because most of those customers will go somewhere else instead of changing their email habits. "Public keys? How does a key protect anything if it is public?" "Cryptographic signature verification?" Good luck explaining that the John and Jane Public.

              I don't expect to see widespread use of email signing (or encryption

            • Publish your public key along with your email address

              How exactly will this stop spam? All it means is the bots that crawl sites looking for email addresses also need to snag the associated public key at the same time. If the information can be obtained by Joe User then it can be obtained by Joe Spammer and fed to his network of spambots. At best, they might have difficulty associating the correct key with the correct email address (though to be usable by Joe User the browser will probably need to associate the two easily) but in this case they'd just encryp

              • First of all, it reduces spam because almost nobody's actually bothering to encrypt their email at the client level, though there's a lot of encryption happening on the transport level (TLS on submission links or between SMTP servers, etc.) So spammers aren't going to bother when there are so many easier targets, but neither are your friends and customers.

                But it also reduces spam because it takes CPU work to encrypt email, and spammers are generally not going to bother with that. 5-10 years ago, it was _e

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by darkpixel2k ( 623900 )
            I hate these forms.
            Let's go through it

            (X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

            What other way will there be of blocking spam? Legislative won't work because there is no one governing body that controls the entire world and can punish those that do wrong.

            Market based...well, it might work, but the solution will probable be some sort of technical device like a barracuda appliance.

            Vigilante would work if we just shot all the spammers, but then those people would go to jail for mur

    • Re:For sending too much email? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@yahoGINSBERGo.com minus poet> on Sunday March 16, 2008 @12:15AM (#22763220) Homepage Journal
      And you'll identify these e-mail servers how? By hostname? (Domain stealing, DNS poisoning, DNS injection) By IP address? (Fake IP headers + source routing, Router table poisoning, Zombies on legit servers, Zombies on any machine between legit server and target) By mail headers? (Zombies anywhere)

      And you guarantee inclusion of legit traffic from mobile sources, how? You don't know what IP address or ISP will be used. What about legit mailing lists, where the originator is indeterminate?

      X.400 provides much better authentication, and offers an API for repudiation, but if that's what people really wanted, we'd be using it. Or maybe everyone would use SMTP-over-SSL where client-side and server-side certificates were validated. We don't use them because people need the privacy, anonymity and flexibility of the existing system, although I'd argue almost anything is technically superior to the existing system.

      In the end, although a totally secure option should exist, an insecure option should also exist that is controlled by policy rather than technology, and that ultimately means laws.

      • "And you'll identify these e-mail servers how? By hostname?"

        Yes, by DNS hostname. It's not mil-spec perfect (nothing is), but it will be 1,000 times better than the not-even-trying SMTP swamp we have now. DNS works just fine, and doesn't get spoofed, for *finding* mail. It will work for *authorising* servers.

        You can layer encryption/signing over the top, if you really want a few more nines. But if people are constantly breaking in and scrawling their name over your stuff, you might as well just lock the doo

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by sleeponthemic ( 1253494 )
      ID theft and tax evasion are the real charges here.

      The "real charges" are based on which charges are politically most popular and Spam is charge that raises the most ire.

    • You sound liek a spammer to me. If you are I really do hope you go to a federal recreation facility and room with a guy named "Buba" who really likes you.

    • I suppose the real crimes committed depend on your perspective. As an IT Director for a state government agency, I have to deal with the problem of spam directly. We have to budget for equipment and manpower (both of which have real costs) to maintain email as a viable method of communication with the people we serve. Money that could be better spent elsewhere to make more of an impact on our clients and ease the burden on taxpayers. Identity theft is an egregious crime, but it affects a much smaller po

    • Re:For sending too much email? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ZorbaTHut ( 126196 ) on Sunday March 16, 2008 @01:30AM (#22763478) Homepage
      Who cares if someone sends junk faxes, the phone network is an open system and it's designed to indiscriminately deliver messages - making junk faxes illegal is a terrible idea. If you don't want wasted toner, just don't accept phone calls from every bozo on the phone system.

      And yet, oddly, junk faxes are illegal, because they cause a significant amount of cost for the receiver. Just like junk email does.

      The law won't [i]fix[/i] things, of course. Junk faxing still occurs. But it might help, if it's designed properly.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mpe ( 36238 )
        Who cares if someone sends junk faxes, the phone network is an open system and it's designed to indiscriminately deliver messages - making junk faxes illegal is a terrible idea. If you don't want wasted toner, just don't accept phone calls from every bozo on the phone system.
        And yet, oddly, junk faxes are illegal, because they cause a significant amount of cost for the receiver. Just like junk email does.

        IIRC in the US faking the CSID on a fax is also against the law. Even if the CLID is bogus.

        The law

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by grumbel ( 592662 )
      Do you have a telephone? Do you mind if I call you around the clock to advertise some junk? It is in a open system after all...

      Spam these days is nothing more then a denial of service attack on the SMTP network and should be punished as such. Just because it is on open system doesn't mean abuse shouldn't be punished, quite the opposite actually, since it is an option system abuse must be punished, since it is the only way to get rid of it.

      The days where it was easy to filter it out by hand and spam was just

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sjwest ( 948274 )

      There are websites that detail the charges against Robert Soloway and what he did.

      I see this a victory against the 'email marketers' who send you spam opt in, opt out, three barrel opt out or whatever the dma are calling it this week. Soloway was a pain for isps worldwide, email, and the infrastucture of the internet.

      How Soloway worked: Soloway 'gets' your email address, you change it, soloway 'gets' it again, but now uses both, result = one bounce and continued spam and now multiply that several milli

  • It's ok, buddy (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    has pled guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion
    Don't sweat it, they've caught the best of them with that one.
    • Actually, he pled to failure to file, not quite the same thing as tax evasion.
      I had written tax avoision, and zonk changed it.
    • yeah and plus, if you're going to run an extremely illegal business, you might as well go the extra mile and not pay taxes on it lol. You know, don't wanna get audited or anything. It's like if you're robbing a bank, you know what, punch someone in the face cuz you're already committing a felony.
  • Part of me wants to do a happy dance that a spammer is finally doing some serious time for their crimes. The rest of me sadly realizes that he is but one of many. One, albeit large head, has been cut off, but the SpamaHydra has many, many more.

    I've seen some pretty interesting ideas regarding a more robust email standard, but I wonder what it will take for everyone to switch to something other than SMTP. We're sort of at a point where spam filters are just good enough to keep the signal within reasona
    • Actually, filters have been remarkably good for me. At work (Gmail), a spam slips through every few days. At home, I have an "unsure" box, which gets mostly spam (maybe 10 a day) and the occasional innocent mail -- out of hundreds hitting the actual spam folder.

      Also, just about any other system would have problems worse than spam -- but it's hard to talk about something abstract. What, exactly, did you have in mind?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday March 16, 2008 @12:16AM (#22763226)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:If only it were so good... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Telvin_3d ( 855514 ) on Sunday March 16, 2008 @12:40AM (#22763328)
        The problem with this? The depressing number of office workers who use their accounts for personal type mail. A company uses your smtpx protocol and promptly sees their rating drop due to the dozen fifty year old ladies in accounting forwarding on every piece of cute spam and donate-to-save-the-children mail they get.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MrNaz ( 730548 )
            Your post advocates a

            (X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

            See earlier posts for the rest of the response.

        • A company uses your smtpx protocol and promptly sees their rating drop due to the dozen fifty year old ladies in accounting forwarding on every piece of cute spam and donate-to-save-the-children mail they get.
          So you're saying the system would work as intended?
           

      • I always envision a system where a new protocol (say smtpx) simply adds to smtp, adding authentication of where the mail is actually being sent from, allowing rate limiting error codes for domains/addresses, and a relationship trust mechanism built between servers.

        This could be built on top of SMTP. The only problem is that either way, you still have to accept mail from people who aren't using it.

        Basically, a server could implement smtpx, so that all emails sent using it must be authenticated (no more hea

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MrNaz ( 730548 )

            What about people who travel around on a laptop, and thus borrow SMTP servers to send mail "from" their home email address?

            So sorry, so sad. That practice has to be let go for the love of god!

            Why? I travel a lot, are you telling me I need a different email address for every location I visit? Imagine if you needed a different email address every time you left the basement! Oh wait, you probably never have, which is why you think what you do.

            Furthermore, this is what i think about you:
            ( ) sorry dude, but

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mpe ( 36238 )
              I travel a lot, are you telling me I need a different email address for every location I visit? Imagine if you needed a different email address every time you left the basement! Oh wait, you probably never have, which is why you think what you do.

              One way of handling this would be to have your machine perform an MX lookup to find out where to send the email. Rather than use a "smarthost". That might run into all sorts of problems with various anti-spam systems which have the effect of forcing people to use
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • Why, oh why, do people hold onto this? Jesus Christ. Set up authentication over TLS. You can connect to your server from anywhere. Wow. here is a tutorial for postfix.

                Yes, because asking home users to configure their ISP's postfix server is really going to work.

                Also, as another poster pointed out, people don't always have their outgoing mailserver set up as a proper MX record for various other reasons -- which means your system would be an inconvenience for a lot of people, for no gain, as I still don't

                • Comment removed based on user account deletion

                  • Keep in mind, someone else has been posting also. I don't personally have a travelling issue, as I can VPN back to my own server. Not everyone can do this.

                    Why wouldn't you have your MX record set up properly?

                    All kinds of reasons. Someone pointed out the mess that can happen in mergers, acquisitions, and splits, resulting in some very interesting MX records (or lack thereof). Right now, I have some servers on Amazon EC2 which want to send mail, but EC2 has dynamically allocated IP addresses, which puts it

          • You send the email to mydomain.com, my server then asks aol if they sent that email, they say no, I reject your email.

            No, the point here is, aol did send that email. Are you saying that unauthenticated SMTP is not allowed?

            So sorry, so sad. That practice has to be let go for the love of god!

            It's not going to. Any solution which fails to take that into account will not work, because it will never be implemented.

            Plus, that's not the only time mail is sent from a server which differs from those explicitly l

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mpe ( 36238 )
          Right now, the best measure I can think of similar to yours is to verify that the actual 'from' in the SMTP itself is from an IP that's actually mentioned in an MX record for said server.

          No doubt if you tried that you'd soon discover plenty of domains where different machines handle outgoing and incomming email. Some strange setups can easily result from corporate mergers, especially if the resultant company makes internal changes, but keeps trading under all its old brand names.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mengel ( 13619 )
        What you're describing is basically SPF [openspf.org], which has been around for several years now. If enough places signed on with it, it would help quite a bit.

        However, it has existed for several years, and we still get lots of spam...

        And you can only put in the encouraging restrictions once enough places use it, otherwise you just delay or block most of the email you need to see.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dan541 ( 1032000 )
      I use RBLs and they are pretty good but over the weekend they seem to have suddenly failed
      I think ive just been hit with a new wave that hasnt yet found its way into RBLs but overall I think solutions such as spamhaus are the way to go.

      atleast for now

      ~Dan
      • No, they don't.
        For the second week in a row, I also have seen a sharp downsteps in all of my mail/spam counters: that's message count, black and grey list activity, RCPT throttle, connection throttle (spamfiltered, relay denied and virlisted don't change much, but they have white noise type spectrum regardless).

        I have two consecutive downshifts at around 17:00 MET Friday (consistent with business hours but WAY deeper then in the past) and another around 15:00 MET Saturday (unprecedented). It's like some vas

  • I hope... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tqphan ( 1066234 ) on Sunday March 16, 2008 @12:02AM (#22763178)
    He shares a jail cell with men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra, and are looking for a new relationship.

  • The rules he's charged under suck (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Sunday March 16, 2008 @12:27AM (#22763262)
    The major charge in this case seems to be that he defrauded a bunch of other spammers. For that, he faces serious time - conning a bunch of nasty people who had every intent to spam a lot of genuinely innocent people if they could. He faces only much more minor time and fines for not paying his fair share of taxes or for spamming anybody who wasn't themselves out to con people. The guy's pond scum, and a few years in medium security looks reasonable, but isn't this all sort of like arresting Clyde Barrow and threatening him with 30 days for each murder, 180 days each for the robberies, and 20 years+ for shortening shotguns?
  • He should be sentenced to be taken to Pike Place Market and slapped in the face with a salmon for each email sent while being forced to drink cheap coffee. Of course, that would probably a horrible waste of salmon.
  • I think there is a very simple solution to the SPAM problem. Migrate the email platform to one that uses micropayments. Each person can set a price for delivery into their inbox. For example, I can decide that to send me a message costs 10 cents. Now every time someone sends me an email, they are charged 10 cents (after a confirmation of course) and I earn 10 cents. You could decide to set a higher price or a lower one. But the point is that people have to pay you to send you email, or it simply doesn't arr
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mpe ( 36238 )
      I think there is a very simple solution to the SPAM problem. Migrate the email platform to one that uses micropayments. Each person can set a price for delivery into their inbox. For example, I can decide that to send me a message costs 10 cents. Now every time someone sends me an email, they are charged 10 cents (after a confirmation of course) and I earn 10 cents. You could decide to set a higher price or a lower one. But the point is that people have to pay you to send you email, or it simply doesn't arr
  • I'm still getting spam?

  • Calm down! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xaxa ( 988988 ) on Sunday March 16, 2008 @01:02AM (#22763396)
    There's too many comments suggesting he should be killed, raped, or otherwise hurt. If you seriously approve of that kind of punishment, either
    a) move to a country with Sharia law
    b) save it for the worst offenders, those that actually murder others, like some US states do
    c) grow up. At worst he's annoyed you, and maybe cost you a bit of time or money.
    • But I don't think the Qur'an has much to say about punishing spammers.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by clarkkent09 ( 1104833 )
      I don't think he should be killed or raped, but he should be put away for more than a year. The cumulative damage he caused to many people in bandwidth costs alone is probably much more than the guy who vandalized a few SUVs as an environmental protest and got 10 years or whatever, too lazy to look up the details. If you want to deter a crime that is easy to commit and where those committing it are hard to catch (as with spam) you do it by imposing harsher sentences.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mpe ( 36238 )
        I don't think he should be killed or raped, but he should be put away for more than a year.

        In which case the most appropriate US prison for him would probably be Camp X-Ray.
    • xaxa, this guy is worse than saddam hussein, osama bin laden, and every child rapist that has ever lived all rolled into one... Have you spoken with him on the phone and asked him reasonably to remove a number of email address's from his "spam list"? he was the one who started the threats... he was the one who initiated contact with me... if he doesnt want to pay a multi million dollar bill for my wasted time deleting his spam... i will send debt collectors that collect "knee caps" over money to pay him a v
    • Sorry but I loose hours a week to deleting spam even with filters. Times that by all the computer users affected and it's a massive loss of time. Why should we loose millions of hours a week so he can hawk crap no one needs and 99% never respond to, he's playing a numbers game. Where in Sharia Law does it mention being locked in a cage with a rabid grizzly bear with a belly full of Viagra? Yes it's rediculous to execute the guy for cyber crime but the fact it was all done on a computer doesn't make it okay.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mpe ( 36238 )
        Sorry but I loose hours a week to deleting spam even with filters.

        The filters arn't free either

        Times that by all the computer users affected and it's a massive loss of time.

        In the process making email a much less useful communication tool. Especially if someone misses real email in amongst all the spam or the spammers attempts to evade filtering mean that legitimate email winds up being filtered.

        Why should we loose millions of hours a week so he can hawk crap no one needs and 99% never respond to, h
      • Sorry but I loose hours a week to deleting spam even with filters.

        How about codifying this? Let's say that deleting a spam takes a second, and the guy sends a hundred million spam messages. Put him in jail for a hundred million seconds; that's 27777 hours or 1157 days, a little over three years. And what kind of spam king would send only a hundred million spam messages?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by JediLow ( 831100 ) *
      Going off your killers comment:

      If an average person spends 20 minutes a month fighting spam (between time they filter through it, work they have to do to pay for the costs, or anything else - which this would be a low number) they end up fighting spam for 3.6 hours every year.

      When you take that 3.6 hours spent by one person in a year and multiply it by the millions of people that receive the spam (for simplicity's sake lets just say its a paltry 1 million), thats costing 3,600,000 hours in a year.

      A pe

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JediLow ( 831100 ) *
        I wish I read the article before. Here're the numbers which he's actively responsible for (at least):

        His company made at least $300,000 last year at $495 a shot - so he sold at least 606 of his packages in a year. With a package lasting 15 days it means he had to sell 24.3 packages to cover 20,000,000 people for one year (since he also sold email addresses and the cumulative effect of that would cover enough to hit the 20 min/month ratio) that means he could cover 500 million people/addresses in a year. W

      • Please forward copies of this e-mail to the court, you congress critter and all members of the senate. (By snail-mail on account of its quite clear none of them reads e-mail)
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Calm down! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dissy ( 172727 ) on Sunday March 16, 2008 @06:51AM (#22764406)

      There's too many comments suggesting he should be killed, raped, or otherwise hurt.
      Seriously.

      For the people advocating death/rape for this guy: just wait until you are falsely imprisoned, or simply imprisoned for a minor infraction such as telling your mind verbally to someone who turns out to be on the 'good' side of the law. It happens very frequently in this country. And non zero odds that it will happen to you as well.

      To everyone else: don't get me wrong, I'm not at all saying Soloway is innocent and should not be punished for his crimes. Just that wishing cruel and unusual punishments on him, which sadly are highly likely to happen to anyone that ends up in jail or prison, will also be forced on a small part of the innocent population as well, and that it's never right.

      I also don't feel stupidity should be punished with nightly beatings, rape, disfigurement, torture, and potentially murder in the prison system either, despite the fact that the people wishing these things on others will probably never learn just how stupid such desires are until it happens to them.
      But I sure do wish there was less stupid people in the world, such as those that cheer for this sort of treatment.
    • If we wanted to torture him, we'd subject him to this [wingmusic.co.nz] and this [wingmusic.co.nz]. Even the CIA refuses to use this torture method, they consider waterboarding more humane.
  • Avoiding spam is not rocket science... 1) set decent email filters or find a provider that does it for you 2) Use multiple email addresses (a junk one for signing up for things such as youtube, promotional offers, etc) and one for personal use 3) Don't post your email in public places (obvious)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chromatic ( 9471 )

      Avoiding spam is not rocket science...

      This may be a wild guess, but you've never run a mail server, have you?

    • Not that hard??

      I've done what you said and made 3 email accounts. I only ever gave my email address to 1 other person, my Mom.

      But somehow the spammers knew my name was John and they found all my adresses!!

      john@yahoo
      john@gmail and
      john@hotmail

      I can't figure out how they did it!!
    • Yeah. That gets rid of the problem, right? On a *PERSONAL* mail server over the past month (multiply by several thousand, probably more, at least, for a typical company's mail servers):

      $ grep -i spam /var/log/maillog* | wc -l
      1803 (got through all of my rejection code, analyzed as being spam)

      $ grep -i greylist /var/log/maillog* | wc -l
      4697 (how many mails from places I don't normally communicate with)

      $ grep -i pre-greeting /var/log/maillog* | wc -l
      487 (mail se

  • I'm pleading for you to use pleaded rather than pled.
  • "identify theft"?
  • Governor Spitzer made his career "fighting" human trafficking, prostitution, and organize crime. If we say it in English - he was holding interests in theses businesses. If not being an owner and an organizer.

    The information of it started to leak at first and then it all was simplified to being a simple client.

    Is it not a reason why human trafficking business is growing?

    Next question - who is fighting the Spam?

  • As someone who provided evidence to the various federal agencies involved, I'm glad to know I won't have to go to Seattle for a deposition or anything else. When I signed documents early last fall, they said to be prepared for a trial sometime in January so guess they didn't miss that mark by much. I mean its not sex but it sure does feel good that this guy has been taken down.
  • A few collaborators - or really, parters-in-crime - that we should look into:
    • The owners of the domains he was spamming for
    • The ISPs that provided connectivity or hosting for those domains
    • The registrars that sold the domains
    • The people who provided DNS for the domains

    There's a good chance that those are different groups of people, and an even better chance that those groups were getting kick-backs from the spammer. Its rare that the registrars and ISPs that keep spamming operations afloat are truly igno

  • Yes: I do believe that public floggings are needed along with the usage of stocks and for those who've crossed the line, hanging. Instead of coddling the criminals, we need to revert back to a harsher sentencing structure that inflicts actual pain and suffering as a punishment. Read Robert Heinlen's Star Ship Troopers (not the damn movie) to see what I'm talking about.

    I suspect that if we finally got around to actually making criminals responsible for their crimes instead of free food/medical/housing that c

    • I don't think that would work, I've recently moved within the UK from a big city to a small town. In the big city I never saw a single fight on a night out (but did hear about the occasional one) in the small town every night out seems to show either a fight being broken up, police talking to whitnesses or as of last friday 10 guys running up and hitting a guy dressed up as a cricket dude because he was dressed up as a cricketman.

      Listening to their self congratulations after they decided that knocking him

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