Good Guys 2, Spammers 0

JoeJob writes "A couple of victories in the legal war against spammers. First, a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam. Second, looks like the spammers who are trying to sue Spamhaus, SPEWS, and other spam blacklists have decided to tuck their tails and run. Let's hope this trend continues." If you care to celebrate this, one food springs to mind.

This is what it has come down (to)

When you look at the big picture CAUCE [cauce.org] and the likes will prove to be the Open Source solution to the problem. Those other guys are just doing it for the banner ads.

Back in the day; when the debate about allowing comerical interest on the Internet fired up, many predicted that today' situation would be the outcome... *soft crap destroying the backbone and .com(ers) diluting the content to the lowest common denominator.

First time I've heard of CAUCE

you can sign up at their How Can I Help [cauce.org] page, and apparently it costs nothing to join.

If you're not in the U.S., you can sign up to their international chapters:
EuroCAUCE - Serving the entire continent
CAUBE.AU - Serving Australia, New Zealand, and all of the Pacific Rim
CAUCE Canada
CAUCE India - Serving Asia and the Indian subcontinent

I'll be signing up today.

I won't be happy till

i won't be happy until there is no spam at all.... That, or capital punishment. Nothing like deterring spam with a good caneing. Anyone who recieves a copy of the spam gets to give the offender a whack. In extreme cases (porn sent to childrens email address, etc.) the spammer is sent to a federal -pound me in the ass- prison. Don't even ask about what happens for the penis enlargement senders ;)

Re:So..

We only support freedom if it doesn't bother us.

We only support freedom/rights as long as they don't overlap our own freedom/rights.

In other words,

Your right to walk down the street swinging your arms around like a windmill ends where the tip of my nose begins.

Your right to listen to your choice of music at your choice of volumes ends at the point where I can hear it.

Your right to speak (including sending spam) ends at the point where I decide I don't want to hear it any more.

In my opinion spam is worse than telemarketing phone calls and if there can be federal regulations that keep somewhat legit telemarketers from interrupting my dinner, there is no reason there can't be similar legislation that stops spam from filling my inbox.

It's Wednesday afternoon and my 'Probable Junk Mail' folder already has 228 messages in it since quitting time last Friday. Someone sold part of our corporate e-mail list to a spammer and I'm one of the lucky few to be in that group. I can't even begin to imagine how much spinning drive space is currently occupied by spam messages in my employer's computer systems (dozens of GB I'm sure) let alone the entire world...

Re:So..

or really hate freedom.

Good point. I mean, if I want to spray-paint advertisements on the side of your house, and then charge you for the materials used, that's my right! Free speech and freedom and all that, right?

Re:So..

You must really hate that spam. or really hate freedom. nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication. i find it amazing that the slashdot crowd who are usually such virulent defenders of an unfettered internet are more than willing to give the government more control when it comes to penis-pill ads!

We love freedom, freedom from assholes who think that they own our inboxes. A marketer's right to push his information into my living room ends at my doorstep, whether it be physical or electronic. This isn't about freedom of speech in this case at all, as it's been determined before that commercial entities have a very limited right to freedom of speech.

See U.S. Supreme Court
ROWAN v. U. S. POST OFFICE DEPT., 397 U.S. 728

Chief Justice BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court:

"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit.... The ancient concept that 'a man's home is his castle' into which 'not even the king may enter' has lost none of its vitality.... We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. That we are often 'captives' outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives everywhere.... The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."

You can read the entire Supreme Court decision on the FindLaw web page (http://www.findlaw.com/). The specific URL is http://www.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US &vol=397&invol=728 [findlaw.com].

Then of course, there's the CyberPromo/AOL lawsuit, in which the judge held that CP had no First Amendment right to send UCE to AOL's customers. The transcript for that case can be found at:

http://www.leepfrog.com/E-Law/Cases/Cyber_Promo_v_ AOL.html [leepfrog.com]

Note: Most of this was lifted verbatim from Message-ID: [e-mail]

Re:So..

but don't go whining to the feds demanding they regulate a free and open communications channel.

Actually, it's not a free communications channel. You, me, and everyone else that connects to the internet has to pay for that connection.

Unlike television and radio, where advertisements are a necessary requirement in order to enjoy free reception (if you have cable, it's your own fault! TV and radio are broadcast free to you) of the programs, spam actually unnecessarily consumes bandwidth and time, especially for those on dial-up and/or metered accounts, and enriches no body but the spammer.

Spam is like all that junk mail you get in your snail mail box every day, except the spammer doesn't even have to pay bulk postage rates.

Whereas TV and radio ads are a kind of symbiosis, where you agree to watch the ads (whether you really do or not), and you get the programming for free, spam is like a parasite. It rides along on the internet, not paying for the bandwidth it steals from people, and clogging their in-box with worthless junk.

Freedom vs. Theft

or really hate freedom.

Or really hate theft.

nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication.

No, it's about the government preventing someone else's "communication" from costing us money. If you want to rent a blimp to advertise your penis-pills, go for it. If you want to pay to put an ad in the back of Rolling Stone, more power to you. If you want to buy time during the Superbowl, have at it. But don't waste my bandwidth and storage, costing me money, by sending your spam to me.

if you don't like spam, do something about it. filter, build a honeypot relay, whatever.

I do. I own the domain anti-spam.org. I use multiple filters and blacklists. I have a honeypot system that includes the time, date, and IP of the system that harvested the address off of my web page. I am a member of CAUCE. I do plenty about it already.

but don't go whining to the feds demanding they regulate a free and open communications channel.

I resent your use of the term "whining." It is rude and inaccurate. The whole problem with e-mail is that it is not "free" in the monetary sense. ISPs and corporations spend incalculable sums of money on bandwidth, servers, storage, backup, administration, filtering products, to deal with spam.

According to Brightmail, roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States was spam as of March of this year. That means that four of every ten mail servers at major ISPs are needed just because of spam. It means that 40% of the bandwidth that the ISPs buy for e-mail is used by spam. It means that ISP's customers are paying for the spam.

If I come over to your house and spraypaint an ad for my autobody shop on your car's hood, don't complain. It's just me exercising my rights to free speech.

Re:Freedom vs. Theft

First, I doubt that there's any material cost to you.

Then you know practically nothing about the problem. Who do you think pays for the bandwidth used by spammers who send mail to your ISP's users? The ISP - and then they pass the costs on to you and the other subscribers.

Second, everyone who has resources consumed by spam can pretty safely be said to have known that there were costs involved in being connected to the network -- if they proceeded, they assumed those costs.

Wrong. That's analogous to saying that you knew that there were costs associated with owning a car so you have no right to complain when someone siphons gas out of your tank every night. By your argument, we all have to accept ever-increasing costs and burdens of spam because we knew that some immoral a**holes spammers existed when we connected to the network. I don't buy it and neither do most reasonable people.

My server is my private property. I paid for it. I maintain it. I pay for the connection. It's my decision who I authorize to use it. There is not any kind of implied permission for every dickhead sleazy con artist who wants to tell me about penis enlarging ripoffs and debt consolidation scams to use my bandwidth, server, and storage to do so. Nor is there permission for them to run dictionary attacks against it to try to dig up addresses. Nor is there permission for them to harvest e-mail addresses off of my web page and, in fact, it clearly states that such use is prohibited.

That said, I recognized your name from previous debates and I find it rather suspicious how you always come down on the side of spammers -- despite having been shown, repetitively, the fallacious reasoning behind your position.

Re:I won't be happy till

I can see the policy now, 1 hit with the cane for every 250k of spam you send.

I think you made a typo. There's not supposed to be a "k" after 250. :D

Re:I won't be happy till

i won't be happy until there is no spam at all....

Then I guess you won't be happy.

Look at the articles that show that there are enough gullible people out there to give the spammers a viable (if repugnant) business model.

I figure the bogus lawsuits against spamhaus present a good way for us to fight back. If we can take down some of the main offenders, it won't necessarily reduce the amount of spam we get, but it might act as a bit of a deterrent for some of the other pond scum.

We need to fix the SMTP protocol to put these guys out of business for good. That, or a bullet...

Re:I won't be happy till

I won't be happy until someone sends me 58,000 copies of a spam message and I get paid $250,000 for it. That's $4.31 per message. I would love it and ask for more. I would even invest in more bandwidth and a server farm so they could send it to me faster.

Virus Spam

Too bad it'd never be feasible to penalize all of the people who aren't patching their systems and thus flooding people's inboxes with virus spam. I'm still getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of fscking "Your Details" e-mails every day -- despite the fact that the problem was widely publicized and (supposedly) widely patched. In a way, this is worse than spam, because not only do I often get more virus mails than regular spams, I *know* I'm using a lot more bandwidth on all the SoBig.F crap...but until it's ever feasible to punish folks who won't/can't patch their systems, I guess we're stuck with this crap, too.

Re: $250,00 a fair settlement? Certainly....

Don't forget, these spammers are actually making considerable profit doing what they do!

At first, you might feel it's excessive to make someone pay out $250,000 for dumping a bunch of spam mail on somebody (presumably by accident, since they couldn't think it made any kind of business sense to send mail tens of thousands of times to the same address?).

If the punishment isn't high enough to make the spammer think twice about his/her actions though, it won't function as a deterrence. (It's fine and good that settlements make amends for wrong done to the person suing, but in cases like this, it's sensible to ensure the money awarded is sufficient to deter the accused from doing the same thing to somebody else. Why cause more people to tie up the court system with similar cases brought against the same guy, if you can put a stop to it the first time?)

Now that's sleazy!

"We are not satisfied that petitioner presently possesses the character and general fitness requisite for an attorney and counselor-at-law," wrote the state's Supreme Court panel [regarding Attorney Mark Felstein]

When a group of lawyers thinks you are too sleazy to join them, then that's really saying something!

Wow

58,000 separate offers to make $10,000 each = a lot more $$$$ than the $250,000 he got He obviously picked the wrong option in suing

Musubi

Spam and rice is what my Hawaiian college buddies called it. You could smell it all the way down the drom hall. And it tastes really good. Really. ;) Kind of reminds me of sushi, only saltier.

Correction...

...good guys: 2, Spammers 1,943,238,345,753,261 (today alone)

Suing SPEWS, etc.

I don't think it's right to sue someone because they're trying to help block spam, but I think the way that some blacklists go about it is very much wrong and harmful to innocent bystanders, and they really should be held more accountable than they are.

Re:Suing SPEWS, etc.

People aren't free to choose if when they're being feed disinformation.

Boycott organiziers like SPEWS should be accountable for what they "say" via their lists. If, for example, they claim to list only spammers, and ISPs that support spammers, but they also list anyone who owns a rabbit, then they are publishing disinformation. It would be completely unfair to bunny owners, and they should be held accountable for that.

SPEWS never said it would only block spammers or single IP spam sources. SPEWS exists to block spam-friendly service providers. Where's the disinformation? Listing starts at the single IP, and maybe the /24 he's occupying. If the spam stops, the listing is lifted. If the spam continues and further complaints are ignored, the blocking expands, sometimes until an entire ISP's delegation is covered.

Again, where's this "disinformation?" Having trouble comprehending the SPEWS FAQ [spews.org]?

"Good guys 2, Spammers 0"

When I saw that header, I was hoping that the article would involve ballistics, automatic weapons, and close-range muzzle burns. Instead, it's only about litigation.

You can imagine my dissapointment.

Why are you dissapointed?

Litigation is a fate worse than a thousand deaths. Lawyers have powers to destroy that far exceed anything mere torturers have available. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can be used to forever dissolve your sense of security, seal away prosperity, call down imprisonment, tortures, and exile, and to confuse you, and kill you in installments, wasting your time away with convoluted garbage. Being flayed alive to death doesn't quite match being nickel-and-dimed to death. One torment lasts hours, another lasts decades.

ISPs?

Would it not be possible for large ISPs to lauch similar suits as class-action? Imagine AOL suing spammers on behalf of all subscribers in Washington, with any judgement distributed among the receivers (minus whatever fees come off a class-action suit).

You'd have people signing up for AOL, just to get the spam.

250k! thats it?

Now 2.5mil woul be painful, but 250k doesn't seem like much. But at least another one bites the dust. And hopefully this will encourage others who have the means to continue to sue spammers. I have the will, but no means. As in I have a desire and a bunch of email records yet I have no money for a lawyer and googling for free info seems to bring up useless adds for stuff I don't need.

On another note I was eating dinner wiht a friend and she told me in VERY strong terms that spam would "never go away" and as a business practice it works great and she supports it. She said in her company's case they "send" out their marketing material to harvested emails that are sold to them froma third party. Yet inthe next sentence she complains about getting penis enlargemtn emails and breast enhancers.....

meh!

Hate Spam? Use SpamBayes

The best anti-spam tool I've found so far is SpamBayes [sourceforge.net], a great open source app that lets you decide what is spam and what isn't. Just train it for a few days (perhaps longer depending how much Spam you get in a day) and it'll filter all the junk mail to a separate folder. If there are any false positives (or negatives), just move it to a "good" folder and train it again. After a week of training, it hasn't failed once!

But will he collect?

This is all well and good, but it will be news for real when the spam house pays up. The chances of ever collecting on this judgment are slim and none.

Actually finding and garneshing their accounts is possible but I can not imagine that will be easy or practical.

The other question I have is, how about a class action law suit. I know about 100 million people that would like to sue, the ULTIMATE class action.

Welcom'...

Da only thin' I can 'tink of is:
I, fo' on', welcom da' new musubi cookin' overlords

I'm not a spammer

But I'd still like to see SPEWS sued into the stone age. If you want to block spam, that's fine... but you just can't convince me that blocking thousands of legit servers, just because they're close to spam servers, is in any way a good practice.

Re:I'm not a spammer

But I'd still like to see SPEWS sued into the stone age. If you want to block spam, that's fine... but you just can't convince me that blocking thousands of legit servers, just because they're close to spam servers, is in any way a good practice.

So, gimme a better incentive for an ISP to clean up its network than being blocklisted to hell and back for supporting spammers? MAPS tried to do it by the single IP and they damned near got sued out of existence, or at least into irrelevance. Other lists have concentrated on listing single IP spam sources and have had only limited effect on the problem.

It took the folks behind SPEWS to get ISP's around the world to sit up and take stock of their problems with hosting spammers, spammish websites and providing dns to spammers. Nothing hits home like listening to a customer tell you about how you're going to leave their service unless they clean up their network space.

Does this frighten anyone?

According to the article, there is an FTC commissioner named Orson Swindle.

Re:This is wrong.

lets leave bandwith and storage out of it and fixate on time lets say it takes you half a minute to delete each spam. If you make $120 an hour then thats a buck to delete the email. Yes I relize thats roughly a quarter of a million dollar sallery but it's not unreasonable people make that mucha nd more. Actualy I think the damages are supposed to be punitive not compensitory. With punitive damages it's a fine that they person that files suit gets to collect sort of a prize for actualy spening all that time on the suit. Compensiory damages are for actual costs incured.

Somehow...

a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam
Somehow, I fell like I'd really like to receive a lot of SPAM now.

The most important part...

It's not about the money, it's not about the individual spammer, it's about a little thing called precedent

In the end it's about winning in court - and a $250,000 win in court would be would more than twice that in settlement. Spammers, time to duck and cover, because I see only more of this type of legal retaliation in the future.

Simple Solution

Okay, It seems to me that there is a simple solution to all of these spam related problems.

Instead of relying on a technological solution that will be circumvented sooner or later, why not follow the money?

Going after the spammers themselves seems to be a losing proposition because they have become adept at being elusive. The people in this equation that cannot afford to be elusive are the ones that are actually collecting money from the targets of spam. The people that are paying the spammers for their services are the ones that need to be penalized. When the spammers are no longer useful they will die out.

Making money from spam should be made illegal. I think it would be a lot more effective at reducing spam than the methods that are being used now.

If my logic is in any way flawed, please let me know.

Good Guys 2, Spammers 0?

it seems to me more like this puts the score at "good guys: 2, spammers: 93856299376591".

maybe I'm just pessimistic?