Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits 382
ackthpt writes "Wired is carrying news that Microsoft, America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo are filing suits against spammers under the CANSPAM act. They will 'follow the money' to find the perpetrators and shut them down. Suits currently filed against John Does will have actual names attached once subpoenas get the names of the actual persons. I wish them all the luck, as I clean about 500 pieces of drek a day from my mailboxes." Other readers point to coverage from the BBC and from the Associated Press (here's the AP story as carried by the Boston Globe).
I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Six spammers is probably a drop in the desert, and shutting them down won't cause a noticable impact, but at least it's a start.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet it will have an effect, but more than likely the long-term effect will simply be to move even more of the spam off-shore.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:4, Funny)
This has been a trend that I've noticed for awhile. Soon all spam jobs will be moved off-shore, and our Government doesn't do anything to stop this.
Earthlink has personally been responsible for 3 severance packages I've recieved (3 ISPs, all bought by Earthlink, and my job phased out.)
Now they want to take away any possibility of me working to create, or to stop spam.
I'm outraged.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but will the spam beneficiaries move off shore (like some of the online gambling operators had to)? Unless they are willing to move also, the "follow the money" procedure will get to them.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:3, Insightful)
# "People will take their illegal business offshore, so we may as well not bother having laws"
# "I filter everything, don't know what you're all complaining about"
# "Only 6 spammers?"
# "I use a challenge-response system, and haven't got an email since.."
Or the usual best
# "But all spammers must be Korean because the proxies they use are in Korea"
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:2, Funny)
With some luck, this'll send them into hiding for a while.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
These six spammers *may* be responsible for (say) 50% of the spams. It is at least a good 'chunk' to make an impact (if that were the case of course)
imho
Special Treatment (Score:2, Funny)
Besides, I am sure that plenty of people would volunteer to help out attaching them
Unless some has a better idea?
Re:Special Treatment (Score:5, Funny)
How about force-feeding them one can of Spam for every spam message they sent? You are what you eat, so maybe you should eat what you are.
Re:Special Treatment (Score:4, Funny)
How about just posting their info on
-matt
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Interesting)
Six spammers is probably a drop in the desert, and shutting them down won't cause a noticable impact, but at least it's a start.
Do you think it's at least as good as doing nothing? Set some examples, drag some faces before the cameras, tell how their houses on Minnow Pond Drive have been seized, things like that. I've got no sympathy. I do hope they really nail the right people. I wish I could bill Alan Ralsky for all the time I've wasted deleting his deluge.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:4, Interesting)
You could try, if you really want to. File a lawsuit, class action if you feel like it. You could use trespass to chattels as one claim - see eBay v. Bidder's Edge [bna.com] for one example (only granting an injunction, but indicating that trespass would likely succeed at trial).
Maybe you could also try unjust enrichment. This generally requires a showing that the defendant recieved a benefit provided by you and that the defendant was unjustly enriched thereby - i.e. to let the defendant remain enriched without compensating you would be improper under the law. Courts in such cases can decide a contract was formed (a fiction) - called a quasi-contract, or they might use another legal construction, but this allows them to order restitution.
I'm currently researching unjust enrichment, unfortunately, it seems a difficult cause of action to prove sufficiently. My guess, though, is that with the bad public view of spamming, courts might be willing to go your way.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't, however, see any way you can make an unjust enrichment claim. It's a requirement for such claims (in all jurisdictions I've come across) that one person is enriched at the expense of another. But the connection between your loss (bandwidth and time) and his profit is just too indirect for you to be able to claim that he is enriched at your expense.
I'd also be surprised if punitive damages are ever available in a claim for restitution for unjust enrichment - you ordinarily just recover to the extent of your loss and the other party's enrichment.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:3, Insightful)
The 80/20 or 90/10 rules likely still apply. A vast majority of the spam comes from a very small minority. Pick your targets well, and it's likely that the effect would be much larger than one might expect on the ratio of spammers to those who were legally apprehended.
Even on a total spammers to those targeted (200:6) it would be about a 3% drop in spam. If these are some of the most senior/most prolific, the effects might be very m
depends on how you shut them down (Score:4, Funny)
I should have been an inquisitor
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize I'm almost alone here in my sentiment, but -- the tide is turning on spam. It's simply making email unusable. Email is too useful and too important to ISPs, software makers and corporate users for them to allow a handful of morons to destroy it. Something has to be done and therefore something _will_ be done.
I keep saying that here and am always surprised by how confident everyone else is for the spammers. I just don't get you guys -- we're all helpless in the face of big corporations but a bunch of dirtbags flogging V*!*a*g*r*a and Par1s H1lt0n V1d30s! can spit in Bill Gates' face?
Re:Not Much (Score:2, Insightful)
It's interesting that we're having another of a technology-beats-technology war here. The success one drives the improvement of the other, and vice versa.
Re:Not Much (Score:3, Insightful)
Good for them (Score:3, Informative)
Today I received 1681 emails, 137 of which are non-spam. Now I have good anti-spam filters, and I probably only opened about 300 of those, but that's still a major pain where it hurts. String 'em up, I say, bring back lynching - mob justice for spammers!
Simon
Re:Good for them (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good for them (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately from that list 7 of the top 10 spammers alphabetically are from the US, though I don't dispute that the general trend is the majority being from the US
Re:Good for them (Score:4, Informative)
I get spam from the #10 guy, but unfortunatly he's recently sold my address so now I get spam from some guy in Lativa as well. While the volume hasn't gone up, the content has changed from being viagra sales to being ads for beastiality. Plus the new spams seem to be harder to filter, loaded with many false html tags trying to get them through. Only 4 emails a day or so make it past the mail filters my ISP uses, but I still don't want that shit in my indox.
137 non-spam??? (Score:3, Insightful)
137 of which are non-spam
You get 137 legitimate emails a day? How does that leave you with time to do anything other than read your email?
Reminds me of my brief stint at IBM, circa 1996-1997: I could have spent literally an entire shift doing nothing but reading the utterly inane, purposeless nonsense that the higher-ups foisted on us every day.
To this day, I contend that, for the vast majority of businesses, email [and instant messaging, and pagers, and beepers, and walkie-talkie/blackberry/802.11xy
Re:137 non-spam??? (Score:2)
Re:Good for them (Score:2)
Why?
We can only hope . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
No, I have no sympathy for joe-clueless, but they do not deserve what spammers deserve.
Re:We can only hope . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Spam is evil.
Microsoft and AOL are fighting spam.
Microsoft and AOL are fighting evil?
My brain hurts...
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Think of this as a turf war between biker gangs.
You have the spammers muscling in on AOL and Microsoft's territory, scaring all their customers. And you have Microsoft and AOL retaliating by taking hits out on the opposing gang leaders.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
crap
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, their spam stance has been pretty solid for a while now. Despite the large number of clueless users on AOL, I can't remember the last time I got spam from them, and they've been remarkably good net denizens in this regard -- they were the first large ISP (to the best of my knowledge) to start using SPF,
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with spam is its cost-shifting. Snailmail doesn't have that problem. They're paying to send you stuff. You're not, typically, paying to receive it.
Oh, and have you considered contacting AOL and asking them not to send you any more CDs?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, people: there are no angels in this business, and everybody knows it. Microsoft is evil, spammers are evil, AOL and Yahoo! are only slightly less evil than the first two; also on the "evil" list are Apple, Sun, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Adobe, and, well, pretty much any company with yearly revenue in excess of $1 million. Every single one of them would dominate the entire business world, crush the competition, and eliminate all innovation that didn't translate directly into greater short-term profits if they could.
What most of us down here at the bottom of the food chain understand is that it doesn't matter. We support companies -- whether "support" means buying their products or just cheering them on -- not on the basis of their moral purity (because there isn't any) but on the basis of what's most useful to us. If Microsoft spends some portion of its ill-gotten gains on cutting down on the amount of spam I get, that is useful to me, even if everything else they do is not only useless but actively harmful. There's no cognitive dissonance involved.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Spam is evil.
Microsoft and AOL are fighting spam.
Microsoft and AOL are fighting evil?
When things like this happen, my thoughts are "Evil vs Evil. I hope the battle does much damage to both sides with the most evil (spam) being destroyed in the process." Hey, you've got to have priorities.
Dispose() (Score:3, Informative)
Spamdemic map (Score:5, Informative)
Hope it works (Score:5, Insightful)
Hope they recover at least their sysadmin's time.
Re:Hope it works (Score:2)
Very good point. I haven't really understood a spam message in a while that has gotten through my filters.
A couple do get through, but I can't get an actual message out of them. Where is the value in doing this?
Re:Hope it works (Score:2, Informative)
Now this is... (Score:5, Funny)
Spammers are my inbox terrorists =(
e.
Can-Spam is not far enough though (Score:5, Insightful)
This won't stop until spammers start getting locked up for years and people stop buying off them.
Re:Can-Spam is not far enough though (Score:2)
I don't think jail time is warranted for spam offenses, especially several years worth. Why don't we keep jails open for the real criminals. Sizeable and enforceable fines will be more than enough to stop the spam that we can legally stop. The rest of it (from China, etc.) will need another solution.
spam (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I do hope the junk Cds dont stop I use them as disposable cup coasters.
Re:spam (Score:4, Insightful)
lobby for the spam filters! (Score:2, Funny)
Great. (Score:5, Funny)
Now i'm going to never get out of debt long enough to afford that penis enlargement.
What is our role? (Score:5, Interesting)
How does this type of announcement (and others like it) affect our role in this struggle? What can we do to make their efforts more fruitful?
I know people who in the past took it upon themselves to trace certain spammers and send an email with relevant data to the host mail provider (lets say, Yahoo for instance) in an effort to perhaps provoke some response.
My question is: does this work? Is it effective? Or will the spammer just as easily switch addresses? If so, was it worth it to give them that kind of trouble or are we simply wasting our time?
If, after this discussion, we determine that it is a worthy method of helping, how would you go about doing it? What type of advice would you give to people who would like to take action once in a while?
Obviously I can't take action against every piece of spam that hits my mailbox. However, there are certain, shall we say...habitual offenders. Looking at my hotmail account over these past few years (I use my optonline account for serious mail) its fairly easy to figure out that a large bulk of those emails are coming from a common source.
Anyway, I'd really appreciate some input - including technical details.
Push them underground? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Push them underground? (Score:5, Insightful)
This "follow the money" routine will work, the spammers need to get paid at some point, and considering most of their income is based on amount of sales from the spam then you just need to have a nice chat with whomever is accepting the loot and sending the products.
Re:Push them underground? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're going underground, you're breaking the law, which gives companies the legal right to issue supbeanas to track down who you are that way.
A lot of people complain about the CANSPAM act saying it makes it legal to send spam. I disagree. While it doesn't make all solicited spam illegal, it does define legal terms
10 years from now (Score:5, Insightful)
Question... (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I, as a web admin, sue a spammer for sending mail to my domain? I'm on shared hosting. (cheap plug: my website is www.oldos.org -- go there. but don't spam me)
This should be at least amusing (Score:5, Funny)
Its always entertaining to see the anti-lawyer anti-corporate crowd actually agree with something that a lawyer heavy super corporation does.
END COMMUNICATION
Re:This should be at least amusing (Score:3, Informative)
Its always entertaining to see the anti-lawyer anti-corporate crowd actually agree with something that a lawyer heavy super corporation does.
I'm not anti-lawyer or anti-corporate. I'm just pro-common sense, which means I oppose the actions of "lawyer-heavy super corporations" on a fairly regular basis. However, even "lawyer-heavy super corporations" do the right thing more often than not.
Re:This should be at least amusing (Score:2, Insightful)
To quote Liv
Re:This should be at least amusing (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the Microsoft lobbyists and salesmen that you have to worry about. Quit thinking of Microsoft as litigious assholes. It's not that I worry about people having ill-will toward MS, but if you think of them as litigious, you're just falling for a feint. That's when you get stabbed in the heart by their real weaponry.
What I find amusing is... (Score:3, Insightful)
They Can Do It! (Score:3, Interesting)
When Will They Sue Uunet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Spam is just getting rediculous! (Score:5, Informative)
Much of this spam has had to resort to making their emails unintelligible to try and bypass spam filters.
Others like Aphroditie Marketing have atleast 2 class C licences with full dns for each address that they send email out from. I've had to firewall off entire class C's to block their emails!
C'Mon...who is going to read email with a subject line like:
"Order Meds V@1|um - XA:n:az ; V|@grA & %RND_MED_VIC+0DIN $
At some point of obfuscation it has to just become a giant waste of time to try and send the email out.
Re:Spam is just getting rediculous! (Score:2)
Why would a spammer waste resources sending out emails that are most obviously spam.
It's like they are doing it just to do it now.
Spam used to have a point...but now?
This is terrible. (Score:5, Funny)
This is an biggest outrage. The only thinging that these companies will accomplish is the suppression of the super legitimate business methods for 100% legal legitimate businesses. This is shameful.
flu regenerate Shakesphere love developppp grandmother popsicle toenail sswlr ssejatdfjqze sskzlc ssbsagvour
Love,
Jenny
bhvysklbe.exabwoiywuakqsrjsaydoic
oxoelfwgiwxrgkzipnhrqd
mm mfywcshvc
hfsusc
To stop these posts to slashdot, send your request toHollywood Plaza Rm. 1903, 610 Nathan Road, Mong Kok, Hong Kong
Effective? (Score:3, Interesting)
In theory, their customers are also guilty of helping the spammers thrive (just like supporting terrorism economically) and in the future should be tagged in some way. The pill companies (or other cmpanies) who are benefitting from increased sales should also be included.
Call me antispam fanatic, but I hate wasting time every day figuring out what to delete and what to read. All the wasted time is basically lost productivity (think productivity in the health care field)
They should go for the death penalty.
Re:Effective? (Score:2)
What about us? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about us? (Score:5, Insightful)
When was the last time the ISPs hiked up the rates explicitly because of the E-mail traffic they had to filter and handle? Call me old-fashioned, but I'd settle for the lower volume of spam that will result from this action The time I would save is worth more than a 50 coupon.
Re:What about us? (Score:3, Insightful)
I just hope the criminal authorities also follow the civil case and then nail these people with criminal charges.
Excellent News! (Score:3, Interesting)
I will applaud this effort, if they are actually able to accurately trace the people responsible. By suing the spammers responsible, their cost of advertising will increase. Less profit. Less motivation to continue spamming.
GOOD LUCK to Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink, and Yahoo in this action!
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3, Informative)
Another point is that the 7% statistic may be skewed, because some of the people surveyed didn't consider all mail to be SPAM (ie, they requested the special offers / catalogs / etc by email)
Wake me up (Score:3, Insightful)
What we need is Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison time for spammers. AOL, Microsoft and others should lobby the government to start prosecuting these spammers. You can follow any one of them and find that they've exploited and broken into other computer systems.
These spammers hack AOL accounts, send out viruses and worms, misrepresent themselves, engage in credit card fraud, break into third-party servers and promote fraudulent activity. We have laws against these sorts of things... criminal laws. Why is it that the only action that seems to be taken is civil?
Re:At least they're following the money (Score:3, Insightful)
Prosecutors go after politically expedient and easy targets. I don't
Better link to AP article (Score:5, Informative)
MyWay.com [myway.com] carries all AP and Reuters articles with no banners, popups, or any kind of registration. Just a couple inobtrusive Google-provided text ads at the bottom. They also have reg-free referal links to NY Times, USA Today, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC stories.
Following the Money (Score:2, Interesting)
Spammers have to be earning a decent amount of money from all those people that DO actually open the spam and buy into those products. Otherwise no one would go to the trouble of cataloguing e-mail addresses, setting up messages and methods to defeat the spam filters, and then sending all of those messages out to bazillions of people.
If you simply follow the money like these ISPs will hopefully be doing. You can punish those using th
UsE BayEsIAn Filters NOW erxcyx.d3q 218 prolific (Score:3, Funny)
"I had lots of spam before. Now I have none! Bayesian Filters saved my life!
John Bismarck"
oierfj.w91i swoerks ms catatonic concinnity arms shipment to fireworks moon salt
And the war to create "good spam" has begun (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a HUGE potential market out there for "good" bulk advertising out there, if only all the pr0n and scams can be eliminated. These large ISPs have an "existing business relationship" with all their customers, and maybe arguably with those that send email through their servers. Just think of how much these ISPs could make by sending "good" spam from Ford, Pepsi, Pfizer, or PlayBoy.
Slashdot Interview with SPAM fighters @ Big 4 ISP' (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this news opens up a great opportunity for Slashdot readers and Sys Admins in general. This would be a great time to be able to put questions to them such as:
1. What are you doing to track down spammes.2. What can we do to assist? Is there some type of site, or address we can send information to assist in tracking down offenders.
Lets get an interview.
Just my thoughts.
Chuckle (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Drek? (Score:3, Funny)
drek'net/ [Yiddish/German "dreck", meaning filth] Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the VMS community. So called because DEC helped write the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also connector conspiracy.
Re:Drek? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Drek? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits (Score:5, Informative)
Since they started the Microsfot Network? MSN started as an AOL style dial up service back around '93-'96.
Re:Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits (Score:2)
Re:Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Maybe the;yy stop blocking my email now (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea this is probably flame bait for slashdot it happens.
I'd block you too (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand that you may not want to use your ISP as a forwarder (neither do I). My solution has been to set up a virtual dedicated server (jvds.com -- no affiliation, just a satisfied customer, yadda, yadda) and run postfix and all the other stuff I want connected directly to the internet there. I still run postfix locally, but it forwards everything to the remote. JVDS is remarkably cheap (I think they go down to $12.00/month, and offer a variety of linux distros as well as freebsd.
Re:We all get spam but... (Score:3, Interesting)
"How do people manage to get this much spam? I'm on about 20 Mailing list and I give my e-mail t a lot of those sites that ask me to sign up. I get maybe 3 a day."
Maybe you're lucky. Or maybe your ISP blocks it before you ever see it. Or maybe your addresses haven't been around long enough.
I own a few domains, have email links on them, belong to mailing lists, etc. I get around 80-100 pieces of spam each and every day. With MacOS X's mail filter I rarely actually see any of them in my inbox, but I sti
Re:We all get spam but... (Score:2)
Unless you actually respond to some of those free pr0n or enlargment offers, you'll not get bombed with hundreds of spams a day like the uber net users do.
Re:We all get spam but... (Score:2, Funny)
"Unless you actually respond to some of those free pr0n or enlargment offers"
So you're saying it was a mistake to join the penis enlargement mailing list? Damn! I knew it!
Re:We all get spam but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Posting regularly in USENET from 1994-2001, and having email addresses online seems to have done the trick for me.
I average a few hundred viral emails a month from infected machines with my details on them, and maybe 300 spams a day.
Most of them I don't see but that is irrelevent. People who say that spam isn't an issue are missing the point.
My colocated box costs me money for a months bandwidth, simply accepting the mail on my server eats into my total bandwidth allowance and that is directly costing m
Re:Open Relays? (Score:2)