AOL Employee Arrested in Spam Scheme 428
LostCluster writes "The AP, Reuters, and AOL's own CNN/Money are all reporting that AOL employee Jason Smathers has been arrested and accused of taking a list of 92 million screennames from the internal AOL system, and selling it to another man, who allegedly used it 'to promote his own Internet gambling business and also sold the list to other spammers for $52,000'. Not surprisingly, Smathers has been fired."
AOL's New Slogan (Score:5, Funny)
Re:AOL's New Slogan (Score:5, Funny)
what about: "hungry? we've more spam!"
Re:AOL's New Slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
prey explain how's this different from their previous slogan.
Re:AOL's New Slogan (Score:3, Funny)
Begging?
Nah, that was a predator's comment, with a bit of poetic license.
Re:AOL's New Slogan (Score:3, Funny)
Re:AOL's New Slogan (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AOL's New Slogan (Score:3, Informative)
Re:AOL's New Slogan (Score:5, Informative)
Mr. Spammers, please delete all @aol.com email addresses in you list, yeah right!
My girlfriend recently recovered an account that has not been active in 3 1/2 years, it still gets flooded with spam despite 3 1/2 years of not existing.
I doubt AOL users will be much better off unless they want to create a new alias.
I'm surprised... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh now that's the last straw (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh now that's the last straw (Score:5, Funny)
Re:92 million?? (Score:3, Informative)
That's a lot of names... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:That's a lot of names... (Score:5, Informative)
The chances of an AOL user falling for a spam-scam are probably good. They already fell for one scam, so they've proven themselves to be targets already.
$25,000? (Score:5, Informative)
Former AOL employee Smathers sold the initial list for an unmentioned amount to Dunaway (the spammer) then Smathers sold an updated list to Dunaway for $100,000. Dunaway sold lists to other spammers for $52,000.
Smathers & Dunaway to AOL members: "All your screenname are belong to us!"
I expect something like this happened at eBay a while back. I changed my email address for eBay to a new mailbox. A few weeks later someone spammed it offering to sell lists of eBay members. Then spam followed, usually from phishers.
Re:That's a lot of names... (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly you've never sent bulk mailings... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. Mailing to AOL is a hit-or-miss thing. We run a lot of mailing lists (bands' fanlists, organiztions' newsletters, etc.) and about half of the time you have AOL addresses on a list they bounce it. And they don't *just* bounce it, they set up a slow-ass connection to your bounce server and time it out (clever idea actually).
So, if you were a spammer, AOL addresses would be of dubious use.
Re:Clearly you've never sent bulk mailings... (Score:3, Insightful)
Kiwaiti
Re:Clearly you've never sent bulk mailings... (Score:4, Insightful)
Clever idea ... but counter-productive in
the long run.
Assuming that the spammer is using a herd of zombie PCs for spam relaying, and each PC can handle multiple mail connections, they are not likely to be slowed down much by this tactic. In addition, spamming PC can be set up to aggressively time out connections to slow mail servers.
On the other hand, people who run legitimate mailing lists may suffer when a list submission triggers spam detection and slow server counter measures. The mailing list server will typically NOT be able to send huge numbers of emails in parallel, and will NOT want to aggressively time out slow mail servers. As a result, if a mailing is (rightly or wrongly) classified as SPAM and triggers counter measures, mailing list delivery suffers.
Re:That's a lot of names... (Score:3, Interesting)
--
9 Gmail invitations availiable [retailretreat.com]
Welcome! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah the only problem is. (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome!
"You've got Bail!"
You've got Bail! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yeah the only problem is. (Score:3, Funny)
"You've got Male!"
Fired? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fired? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fired? (Score:5, Informative)
And I don't think anyone can argue that there's cause here.
Re:Fired? (Score:4, Funny)
Only if can aim well, and have a strong arm.
Re:Fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fired? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some guy brought in a gun to work with him at the UC Davis monkey lab, allegedly with a list of people he was mad at (gun for sure, not sure about the list). He's one of the same 2 people who "lost" a monkey. That one made national news, and the other guy got a promotion. Anyway, he got 30 days of "administrative leave" for the gun, which meant they were going to fire him.
Security was told, "Hey, we had to suspend this guy. If he shows up, wave, let him through, and call the police because he knows he's not supposed to be here". No point in actually telling the security why they were looking for him. And no point in telling employees what was going on. This was during the period when UC Davis was trying to get the Level IV Biohazard Lab, so that *might* have been part of the secrecy, but I think it's because all state jobs usually have A Giant State Head up their ass all the time. In the meantime, this guy got arrested in Wyoming, with the gun, with filed off serial numbers, and illegal drugs. He was in a car his mom rented that wasn't supposed to leave the state. Not sure how much time he's serving. But being black in a Wyoming prison can't be fun. He was a nice guy before he started taking drugs.
Re:Fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, AOL doesn't have an opportunity to wait around and find out whether or not this guy is guilty in a court of law. This is a huge privacy breach affecting millions of people. According to CNN's version of the story, not only did the list contain screen names, it also had each user's telephone number, ZIP code, etc. AOL has no choice but to take immediate and harsh action, i.e. terminating the employee and alerting the authorities. If they hadn't fired the employee they'd be sued faster than you can say "1099 Hours Free."
There may be lawsuits anyway. Millions of people entrusted their information to AOL, and now it's floating around in the hands of who knows how many spammers.
Re:Fired? (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't read through the whole thing, but my guess is that an informant approached the secret service and the case began outside of AOL. AOL really has no interest in this case being prosecuted. The bad publicity will cost them much much more than any restitution they'll get out of an unemployable 24 year old.
Fired? Hell... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fired? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fired? (Score:3, Informative)
From this [bls.gov] (pdf) article in the "Monthly Labor Review" written by Charles J. Muhl, Esq. "In legal terms, though, since the last half of the 19th century, employment in each of the United States has been "at will," or terminable by either the empl
Security? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Security? (Score:5, Insightful)
92,213,798 rows returned.
[employee thinks to self]: "Dude! Cool! Bonus! We only had 91,125,553 last time I ran this. I'll have to thank the marketing department for sending out those CDs!"
Re:Security? (Score:5, Interesting)
As it happens however he has been caught. How was he caught? I don't know, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the aforementioned database had triggers and an audit trail that says who did what and dumps it in a log somewhere. Or perhaps he tripped over by querying for everything including the flagged accounts - accounts that AOL regularly sacks people for looking at because they belong to celebs and so forth.
It would not surprise me at all if the alarm bells didn't start ringing as soon as the DB ground to a halt while it was returning 92000000 rows.
Re:Security? (Score:3, Interesting)
Since the FA says he did this at least twice, either they don't check their audit files very often, or he was ratted out by someone later, or did something stupid with his ill-earned cash to attract attention.
Re:Security? (Score:3, Insightful)
And, by piping it through gzip, he wouldn't end up with a huge intermediary file:
Well, that's how I would have done it. Actually, I would have done it using someone else's account :-)
Re:Security? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Security? (Score:3, Funny)
I'm talking about what that might have been not necessarily how they pinned the culprit down afterwards.
As for ground to a halt, I suggest otherwise. There is not a database on earth than could do a join on several tables (in this case screen IDs to account holders) without incurring a significant hit t
Double standards.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Double standards.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate the "double standard" arguement (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is the inherent problem . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
The primary issue to be feared is not that someone who isn't trusted with the data will get ahold of it, but that someone who is trusted with the data will turn out to be untrustworthy.
The same goes for backdoors. I'm not half so worried about some script kiddie hacking my router as I am some employee/former employee of Cisco simply walking right in.
KFG
Now do the same over at MSN/Hotmail (Score:5, Interesting)
i've confirmed this. (Score:5, Interesting)
it seems to really only happen on new accounts though. old hotmail accounts dont seem to get spam, if you dont publish them anywhere.
it's entirely possible someone has recently (within the last few years) backdoored hotmail's account creation system to notify them of new accounts, which would explain why old accounts dont get any spam.
Re:Now do the same over at MSN/Hotmail (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Now do the same over at MSN/Hotmail (Score:5, Insightful)
The likelihood of a dictionary attack hitting a n character random string of characters and numbers is miniscule for n larger than 15 or so, even if the dictionary attacker is trying 1 million combinations a second, because there are (at least) 36^n user names in that space.
my rough calculations say that it would take 7 billion years to dictionary attack the space of 15 character random numbers of and letters, even if you could do so at a rate of one million a second.
So if your 15 character random user name gets spammed immediately after creation without ever being used, it's an inside job.
But I wouldn't be surprised if it was buried in the Hotmail terms of service that they can sell your addresses.
Fair Punishment (Score:5, Funny)
Ah but it Never happen. (Score:5, Funny)
This reminds me (Score:4, Interesting)
% wc -l /etc/passwd /etc/passwd
184533
Re:This reminds me (Score:3, Interesting)
Congratulations on completely missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, and a huge list of email addresses. In the case of the grandparent, about 183,000.
More details (Score:3, Informative)
AOL (Score:5, Funny)
In response to this 99% of AOL members surveyed who recieved the e-mail clicked on the link and frittered many dollars away at the casino making spam profitable and so continuing the downward spiral of e-mail.
One user replied saying : "I trust AOL so much when it comes to spam, they always send me the top dollar stuff like penis enlargement pills and always ask me to change my password on non secure sites and ask for my credit card as my account has been hacked. They care so much"
Maybe there're more? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about those screennames? (Score:5, Interesting)
In the article AOL didn't seem to mention what they are doing to protect the victims, except "they are thoroughly reviewing and strengthening our internal procedures".
Is this good enough? Sometimes you can punish the offender enough to compensate the victims.
Re:What about those screennames? (Score:3, Interesting)
An observation. (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when I was in my early 20s and lets just say I didn't have a lot to lose... and everything to gain from taking a chance here and there. By placing less mature workers into places where personal ethics and great responsibility collide, you're asking for issues just like this.
I don't mean in indict all younger workers. Certainly most are good employees; I've hired many younger people without trouble. But as a percentage of population, the younger I expect to make more 'mistakes' both simple errors and errors in judgment.
My two bits...
SCB
Re:An observation. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:An observation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't we put it another way? "Note that both people involved were guys. By its traditional discrimination against women (who more civilized) in favor of men (more aggressive and violent), IT is introducing a security risk since men will take more chances." It makes as much sense as the above "these damn' kids screw up all the time" rant (and before some /. feminist says "you go girl!", I should add that I'm male, 23, and consider both arguments completely idiotic).
IT is a younger field, therefore more IT guys are younger. Granted, it's been around for the last 40 years, but for about half of that time, you needed a lot of money to get a computer. The generation that got to use truly cheap computers came of age just ten years ago. It's natural that there is now an explosion of younger IT workers.
Marital, family, religious, and civic ties to society, IMHO, are much more likely to keep people honest than their age, even counting the fact that younger workers may be less experienced. And if you don't believe me, check a newspaper and see how many older, powerful men are at this moment headed to Club Fed because they weren't any better at ethics than the AOL dimwits mentioned in this article. Most of Congress is composed of older men, and I'd almost rather have Sanford Wallace (of Cyber Promotions infamy) representing me than some of these folks.
I work in a government agency, so I see a large proportion of older workers. Some are smart, hard workers; others are idiots. I see no larger proportion of idiots among younger people than I do among older ones, nor do I see any indication that the intelligence or ethics of the old have anything to do with the fact that they are old.
Re:An observation. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the counter-point you offer to try to discredit my argument is, itself, true. By the way, my observation is derived not from a single article but experience from my experience working in IT. The article simply providing an interesting context.
IT is a younger field, therefore more IT guys are younger. Granted, it's been around for the last 40 years, but for about half of that time, you needed a lot of money to get a computer. The generation that got to use truly cheap computers came of age just ten years ago. It's natural that there is now an explosion of younger IT workers.
I'm not sure what relavence this statement has to my point. This is all true on the face of it, but neither supports nor detracts from my hypothesis. What I will say, assuming your statement is true, is that the impact mistakes made by anyone in IT has the potential to be greater than at any time in history. Would, 40 years ago, a couple of 20somethings have had the tools to commit a crime that impacted as many 93 million people? What if he weren't at AOL, but Bank of America?
Marital, family, religious, and civic ties to society, IMHO, are much more likely to keep people honest than their age, even counting the fact that younger workers may be less experienced.
Thank you for help in supporting my point. Much of my point is predicated on the fact that younger people are more likely not to have the same connections and convictions that older people do. How many professional 24 year olds are married as compared to say married 45 year olds? How many have their own families (a strong connection than to just mom & dad)? Never did I mention experience: I was careful to say mature.
And if you don't believe me, check a newspaper and see how many older, powerful men are at this moment headed to Club Fed because they weren't any better at ethics than the AOL dimwits mentioned in this article. Most of Congress is composed of older men, and I'd almost rather have Sanford Wallace (of Cyber Promotions infamy) representing me than some of these folks.
I find trouble in using the newspaper to uncover trends, there are too many other factors to consider them useful sources of this kind of information. Older people are more likely to have roles in more sophisticated, larger stakes games. But what we don't see in the papers are how many people are being put away for $50K in embezzlement here, $75K in kickbacks there... in fact, if it weren't for the 93 million users, you would probably have never heard of this either in the papers. I still maintain that younger workers will have higher security issues as compared to the population as a whole. By the way... how many older people do we hear about getting put away writing viruses and worms? Don't confuse high profile for quantity or even severity.
I work in a government agency, so I see a large proportion of older workers. Some are smart, hard workers; others are idiots. I see no larger proportion of idiots among younger people than I do among older ones, nor do I see any indication that the intelligence or ethics of the old have anything to do with the fact that they are old.
Don't get me wrong... avarice comes in all ages. But the selection process for congress is slanted to those that are most likely to be less than honest and government workers are place, in my experience, by other less than optimal hiring methodologies. Though, sure there are older idiots as well. But I find the young, smart, but overly ambitious types to be the ones to keep an eye on.
Well argued nonetheless. And for the record I'm an old guy in tech terms... mid 30s!
Cheers!
SCB
ObSimpsons Quote (Score:4, Funny)
What a crime! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mr. Burns (Score:3, Funny)
*taps fingers expectantly*
Excellent...
$25,000 ? For 92 million verified addresses? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:$25,000 ? For 92 million verified addresses? (Score:3, Insightful)
92 million verified AOL email addresses, well, that's pure gold. You know if they're an AOL subscriber, they're a sucker anyway...
Honeypotting with stolen names (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Honeypotting with stolen names (Score:4, Interesting)
Correct, but in this case IP has a parellel to stolen property called stolen trade secrets. Basically, since this is information obtained by illegal means, it's illegal to use this information for profit.
AOL has to tell California customers (Score:5, Interesting)
If I understand correctly, California has a law that requires a company to contact each customer that was affected by disclosure of information due to a security problem. I wonder what that'll cost AOL.
I'm also interested if the spammers the casino guy resold the list(s) to will also be prosecuted for purchasing stolen goods. At a minimum, they should be publicly identified.
Re:AOL has to tell California customers (Score:5, Funny)
All AOL has to do is give the list to a spammer and ask him to mass-mail the required information.
Mr. Burns ... (Score:3, Funny)
Hmmmmm, mmmmm! "SMATHERS!!!! YOU FIRED!"
Smithers
Emmm, "That's Smithers, Mr. Burns"
Mr. Burns
Hmmm. "Smithers - Smathers, whatever your reeaaaal name is, hmmmm - GET OUT."
Smithers
"But Mr. Burns!"
Mr. Burns
"OUT, OUT, OUT, I say - and no dilly-dallying, scoot, scoot."
Too late (Score:3, Interesting)
RICO AOL out of business (Score:3, Interesting)
Oops, that's right - they have no security system. That's why some idiot can swipe 92meg of users and sell them to some other idiot who wants to spam us with his own (did I say these guys were idiots?) gambling scheme and then resell the 92meg of users to the other vile spammers.
AOL can't be let off the hook. They had a duty to protect the user base as certainly as every one of us has a duty not to leave loaded guns where 5 year-olds can play with them. This is a clear example of AOL permitting a dangerous instrumentality to fall into the hands of the incompetent.
BUT, we should also tell Ashcroft that the two idiots are "the terrorists' friends" and let Ashcroft make them disappear (along with their families, friends and dogs).
Re:RICO AOL out of business (Score:3, Funny)
I call for parity: 920 million minutes of community service for AOL's management and the two idiots. .
AS AN ARTIFICIAL REEF off the Florida (or New Jersey) coast.
New Dictionary Term (Score:5, Funny)
"Man, I just got this new Hotmail account, but in less than an hour, it's been smathered!"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
I WOULD HAVE TOO! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you offered me $52,000 for a list of emails or names and info from my work i'd take itin an instance. I may get fired and sued but hay with that I could afford to move out of this shit whole and be over seas with my family tomorrow.
So.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Crhis Mattern
AOL Lax Security __TAKE 2__ (Score:3, Interesting)
Hack Your Way to Hollywood [wired.com]
You know, the word "hack" above really bothers me.
the cat is 1,200 miles from the bag (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Restrict mobile/personal storage and technology within the IT core;
2) search employees entering and leaving the IT facilities for CDs, storage dongles, smart cards, USB-enabled watches and lapel pins, MP3 players, laptop computers, palmtop devices, etc;
3) workstations used by developers have no Internet access whatever;
4) no public/personal email access from developer workstations;
5) the firewalls and other IT are managed by people who never come into contact with someone who themselves has access to data, and IT people have no access to data themselves;
6) all data traversing the LAN is AES encrypted;
7) there is no wireless access anywhere in the business, period.
Did AOL do *any* of this? Even one thing? I doubt it. Why would they? these aren't even standard practices except maybe at the NSA.
And that's just the AOL IT people. What do you then do with the marketing and sales folk? Presumably, they don't have the right kind of access to bulk data in the first place and/or cannot save data to storage that they can pull up in the normal course of work, but that's another policy to set up and more restrictions (ie, they cannot save files to their workstation, and cannot burn CDs, and cannot bring laptop computers home, etc.) And what if AOL decided to outsource customer support? What path does data take then?
All of this would kinda-sorta make sense when protecting things like source code where there are only a few that need access anyway, and there is no obvious reason for the code to leave the site. But in the case of customer account info, that's not restricted to development and the customers are dealing with very low level employees who need a broad kind of access to customer data to deal with customer issues.
I don't know if there are very many companies that would put their minimum wage earning sales and support drones (or their outsource suppliers) through that kind of security policy. And the marketing people would simply bite your head off at the very mention of leaving their laptop computers at work.
Reality: The only personal data that is safe is the data that is encrypted, then the passcode encrypted, then the passcode is lost, then the data is deleted, then the disk containing the data is formatted and overwritten with random bits, then the disk removed from the system and shredded, and then the small bits are randomly distributed over the surface of the sea. At night during a storm.
Failing all that...well don't expect your personal data to be private for any length of time so long as someone...anyone...the janitor...an intern...a poor working mother in Pakistan...can make a buck (exactly $1US) selling it.
Hate to break it to you all... (Score:4, Insightful)
At MCI, where I used to work, I would see the personal information including name, address, phone numbers, credit card numbers, birthdays, and email addresses of hundreds of customers a week. Not only that, but every employee was identified in the system by his or her SS#, and your SS# was stamped on every note you placed in the system.
I earned $8.47 (American) per hour, and the call center contractor had a less than rigorous screening process. I did have a pulse, so I was hired. I have more ethics than the company I worked for, and I would never do such a thing.
But you have to ask yourself, if a company is willing to hire employees for next to nothing, and hand these employees access to information that they can sell for 3 times what they earn in a year, how long untill the SS# you give the company is compromised?
Do not give truely sensitive information to companies. If they do not have legal authorization to demand a SS#, they are using it for identification purposes only. Give them a fake one.
On another note: Anyone want to hire an aspiring writer? Seriously, $8.47/hr is still better than the $0/hr I'm making now. Please!
Be strong!
What is the crime? (Score:3, Interesting)
He used an AOL laptop (Score:3, Funny)
It's clear from reading them that this guy was not one of the brighter people at AOL.
Appropriate penalties (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, I am not a particularly vengeful person, or at least I don't really want spammers to face the death penalty, castration, or other such suggested punishments.
Jason Smathers has been charged with theft and fired by AOL. I'm assuming the actual charge is something like felony grand theft, and that the amount his co-conspirator got for the lists will be all the proof AOL will need to offer for a grand jury to agree with that charge.
According to the article, he also used another employee's ID in the act. That's probably either a separate charge or at least an aggrevating factor to the first charge. Among lots of other effects, this employee probably has standing to sue both men and a fair chance of winning, regardless of whether AOL does (with "winning" limited by the condition that they must somehow have forfitable assets after their prosecution).
It also looks like there was possibly more than one actual theft, as the article mentions the men either actually obtaining or conspiring to obtain an updated version of the list, which would imply an older version also existed in their posession. One or both men may have made fraudulent promises to a person or persons who bought the list, representing it as legally obtained.
So, Smathers could well be inditeable with three or more felonies (three strikes rules may apply), and it's possible with multiple persons accused that the whole thing could fall under RICO, either of which could easily make the overall sentence 30 years or more. Even with the usual time off for good behavior type clauses, that means serving a good solid 18 years or so.
AOL probably wants the whole thing to go away. Since they can't really get that, the next best thing is to get seriously Neolithic on his ass, and hope it has a deterrent effect.
Re:Arrested and accused... how about convicted (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the government. I can't do anything prison-like or fine-like to you without convicting you first.
Hi.
I'm your employer. Unless you have a contract stating otherwise, odds are you're an at-will employee, which means *I can fire you for just about any reason I want*.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd love a world where I had a guaranteed job, but just like everyone else, I work for mine. I was just explaining the difference to the original poster between "innocent before proven guilty" and "we can fire you if we damn well want to."
Re:huh? (Score:4, Funny)
a company that can't fire people at will is a company that will be burdened by excessive, redundant and unnecessary employees, and will cease to be efficient or make money
hey, leave those poor public servants alone!
Re:Access? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Access? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Access? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Access? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mind you, the rules have changed today:
- Find someone with an itch they want to scratch
- Make sure they have integrity
- Turn 'em loose
Which can be summarized in 1 sentence: Only work with people you can trust completely, and do nothing to betray their trust in return.But, back to what the posers were saying. It's a balancing act. Each side watches the other. If you've ever worked as an outside consultant, you get used to that sort of dynamic VERY quickly.
Reminds me of one time I was consulting, and the prima donna head coder didn't believe that a query with millions of records would run fast enough on a 486 (this was about 10 years ago). Didn't understand that properly indexed searches scale nicely, instead of linearly.
So, I told everyone that I would prove it tomorrow. Went in after supper, dumped copies of all my code and data onto 2 machines (a server and his box), reformatted, re-installed, and wrote the code to generate my test database. Then went home to bed.
Of course, the next morning, idiot has already complained to management that I must be up to something fishy, because all my code is wiped from my machine (snoopy little snot), and they want to know why they should continue to trust me.
So, I explain that it's all sitting on the idiot's own box, as well as the server, because, remember, we're doing a test today, and I needed all the disk space I could find.
Oh, the reason I call him an idiot? He wanted to continue arguing about whether a query would execute fast enough, when it was easy enough to test. That's just plain stupid. But it's the sort of thing you have to learn to handle if you're going to do consulting :-)
Re:Access? (Score:3, Insightful)
Having an itch to scratch does nothing for the guy who's gambled his way under a mountain of debt and who goes from being completely trustworthy to being willing to steal from his best friend, to say nothing of his employer. That's not a hypothetical case; I'm thinking of a particular person with whom I worked about a decade ago. (Luckily for me, I wasn't one of his friends, so he di
Re:Just Submitted (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That's it?!?!?!?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
For breaking what law?
I don't mind so much that my employer can fire me for pretty much any reason they like. I can quit for pretty much any reason I like, too. But I sure don't want to live in a world where my employer can send me to prison.
Re:That's it?!?!?!?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I think the dweeb should be staked out on an ant-hill or drawn and quartered but I've been accused of being a little extreme when it comes to spam, spammers and people who disclose e-mail addresses without the owners's permission.
Re:That's it?!?!?!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
would prison be a good enough deterrent? (Score:3, Interesting)