Judge In e360 Vs. Comcast Rules e360 a Spammer 156
Brielle Bruns writes "Yesterday, Judge James B. Zagel dismissed claims against Comcast by e360. In the decision, the judge says: 'Plaintiff e360Insight, LLC is a marketer. It refers to itself as an Internet marketing company. Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.' This clears the path for Comcast's counter-suit." e360 is the spammer that got a default judgement against Spamhaus, as we have discussed on numerous occasions.
CvE (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast vs. e360Insight: Whoever loses, we win.
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Or is that:
Comcast vs. e360Insight: Whoever wins, we lose.
I guess it depends on if you are a "glass half full" or "glass half empty" kind of person.
Re:CvE (Score:4, Funny)
I say, "Go Comcast!"
Re:"positive business"? What are you smoking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Contrast that to e360, who provide a "service" that nobody wants at all. nobody wants e360 gone so that they can get service from a a different spammer, they want them gone because they don't want to be harassed by any spammers at all. Comparatively speaking, Comcast are saints.
To use a non-vehicular analogy, Comcast is a shitty hospital that provides poor service to the community but is operated and staffed by people with huge community interests and friends in high places, while e360 is a group of frat boys who are paid to steal stop signs so that (outstandingly) sleazy injury litigators can stir up more business in the area.
What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:5, Informative)
Still, the [i]majority[/i] of the costs are borne by the mailer, thus resulting in limites to the amount, and at least some specifivity. Not to mention that in order to get the best rates you have to identify yourself to the post office pretty well. This limits the amount of scamming that can be done as the scammers are normally stuck paying first class if they want to do anonymous drops. That increases costs to the point it has to be a very good scam or very selectively mailed if the scammer is to have any hope of making money and avoiding the postal police.
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Personally, while I'd use junk mail in a furnace(vented to the outside), I wouldn't use it to cook food, too many chemicals.
Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:5, Informative)
Now I get essentially zero addressed junk mail.
Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:5, Informative)
and I get practically 0 junk mail... One place to call/visit, as opposed to haveing to call capital one... amex... etc. etc.
Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:5, Insightful)
The spammer shares the costs with the recipient's ISP, and ultimately the recipient (through increased ISP costs). The cost of any one individual spam is very low, but taken together they quickly become noticable.
The junk snail mailer pays for all of the mailing costs, but each piece of junk mail he sends must be recycled or thrown away, creating a small effect on the cost of garbage for each individual user. The cost of any individual junk mail is very low, but taken together, they do have an appreciable effect on the cost of trash collection.
Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sort of like paying $5 for a car and making somebody else pay the rest of the sticker cost for a luxury car. Yes technically they're both paying, but even street people around here can get their hands on $5 without too much trouble.
Trying to fight spam with legislation doesn't have a chance without global cooperation, and the Russians in particular just don't care, as do a few other nations. It's difficult to deal with places like the US where most of the spam originating from here is doing so from compromised computers.
Technical deterrents are difficult to get right, and while they do allow for some help, it's impossible to really fix it. It makes a difference, but with the current net architecture it's a challenge to stop spam and have anonymity as well.
Ultimately what things come down to is making it less rewarding. What we really need is the ability to fine companies that are paying spammers to advertise for them. Admittedly it would be nice to see spammers drawn and quartered, but realistically, it's far easier to find Target, Walmart, Bestbuy and the other companies I've seen advertised than it is to find a cyber criminal that may or may not be located somewhere in southeast Asia. It's just so much easier to follow the money than it is to try and follow the spam.
Of course that's going to be fought tooth and nail, and I'm sure there are other problems with it. But it's a far easier solution to the problem than the others are. Of course, that isn't a license to ignore the other parts.
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Linhardt is claiming that with me. (Score:5, Interesting)
In their failed summary judgment motion (asking the court to dismiss the case based on some evidence), they claim that the spam I tracked to them is not theirs, but it must be someone trying to make them look bad because: 1. They don't spam; 2. That it could have been created in a word processor using publically available information; 3. They don't format their e-mails that way; 4. That it did not come from their IP addresses.
e360 ignored that they have used Atriks, which hides the true IP address by running it through a sort of legal botnet. They also ignored that they use anonymous domain name registrations, so I must have been a good guesser to get most of the domain names correct (their co-Defendant, Moniker, admitted that most of the domain names I identified to e360 were registered through them to bargaindepot.net -- their sister company/codefendant).
the Russians? (Score:2)
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Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I've read about some countires in Europe and other places placing a surtax on goods to handle the cost of disposal (for the packing materials only, IIRC). Maybe something si
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Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:4, Informative)
In municipalities that provide trash collection, the government ends up paying that part of the costs of direct mail advertising.
Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:5, Insightful)
SPAM on the otherhand is advertising without the good. They dont support services that we want they are a burden on ISPs even the company who chooses to Spam reputation (albiet I havent seen a legit product being sold in years) will be shot. It really is a take-take indrustry that gives nothing back. At least tobaco comanies keep generations of farmers in business. SPAM operations run cheap make money without any benefit they are not a positive impact on the economy, they do no good.
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Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:5, Funny)
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You should stop doing that. Instead, stuff all the spam back into the postage-paid business reply cards envelopes they send. With a little tape, you can really fit a lot of paper into one of those. They look like balloons when I mail them back. And the mail-spammer gets to pay the postage for the trash back to them! Free for me, helps the post office with a little revenue, and financially penalizes the mail spammers -- that's win/win/win!
If you have a free source of bricks or stone around, you could also send them some samples [officeofst...luence.com].
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Basically it has to be in suitable condition for mailing as a first-class letter, even if it's overweight. Snopes has the links to the actual USPS regs on it.
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Snopes has a thread [snopes.com] and a page [snopes.com] that mention this, but neither cites regulations or even suggests that the post office will not deliver it (because they will!) Snopes does say this won't reduce the amount of junk mail one gets, which is fine and not at all the goal.
Anthrax? What? Not sure what makes you think the PO would assume a large taped-up envelope or box would be full of an
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Wow. That's six gallons of junk mail every day! That's like an entire canvas mail sack daily. Or you're really fluffing it up before recycling it. Or you're in a more desirable demographic than I am (when filling out stupid surveys, I tend to claim that I am a 110 year old retired minister with no income). I get maybe a paper grocery bag (5 gallons?) in a month (or longer). Four or five pieces a day.
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Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:4, Insightful)
-Rick
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If you want to get really green about it, grow your own algae farm. Use the algae to reduce the unburnt hydrocarbons in your fireplace/furnaces exhaust. Crush the oil laden algae for your own diesel fuel, then ferment the crushed husks for ethanol. And with the left over dredges you have perfectly good filler
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2. Feed junk mail to the goat
3. Drink the goat's milk.
4. Use the goat dung as fuel (Indian-style).
5. Eat the goat.
There are lots of good recipes for goat curry or jerk goat. They don't even mind the plastic envelope windows, and they save you the electricity that you would use to run a shredder.
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With email spam, there are several stages where you can block the connection before the mail is delivered, thus reducing the cost to you. Not completely eliminating it, but reducing it. I know of no similar steps to take with snail spam.
Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:5, Informative)
This will block 90%+ of junk mail, and I actually signed up months ago. The only junk mail I get is a local free newspaper that just gets stuffed into every box regardless.
http://www.dmaconsumers.org/consumerassistance.php [dmaconsumers.org]
This thing is pure gold. It will block ALL of those "pre-approved" credit card offers. You know the ones, they come with a 29.99% APR, a $650 limit, and yearly fees? Well, at least the ones my wife gets do. I signed up on this thing and I haven't had a single one since.
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ [optoutprescreen.com]
Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:4, Informative)
One: Verisign signature.
Two: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/prescreen.shtm [ftc.gov]
FTC.gov page about the website.
There are also some blog entries around the web where people have had the same feelings about the website and it's possibility of fraud. As always, do your own research. But it looks legit.
~Wx
But if I did that... (Score:2)
But if I blocked all the credit card offers, how would my wife and I continue to float thousands of dollars at 0% for years and never pay a dime for the privilege???
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Yes.
Given that's not a .gov address, I assume what you are talking about is a service which politely asks those companies to stop spamming. This may work in the real world, because it actually costs money to send these things, and they are sent by human beings, not robots.
However, it is not a way to "block" anything. I can't simply create my own filte
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And email spam is also illegal. I'm not entirely sure this would be effective, and I'm also fairly sure that it would be a bit of work.
I am not saying I wouldn't ask for an opt-out. But it is a band-aid.
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That's getting dangerously close to an argument the carriers would use to justify charging content providers for delivery of their content to end users. If everyone is in agreement that no one should be able to force extra infrastructure charges on someone else beyond what was planned for, then what defense do we have against AT&T assessing a surcharge on Y
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Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, so, let's see. The less customers USPS have, the lower the price for stamps?
If everyone sent 50 letters/day, the stamp price would be so high, it would be unthinkable?
Apparently I fail to follow this logic.
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Actually, Labor is the largest expense of the USPS not fuel.
The USPS is not an "on demand" entity. The carriers still run their routes regardless if there is a piece of mail destined for an address. Each rural mailbox and postal center collection box must be checked for outgoing mail. Every postal employee that is full time gets paid regardless of the work load.
Now what junk mail does is offset the expense that the USPS has to pay on a daily basis. The more junk mail passing through the postal system, the
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It costs the USPS less to deliver junk mail than the mailer paid.
It costs the USPS more to deliver personal mail than the mailer paid.
Junk mail subsidizes personal mail.
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Re:What's the distinguishing characteristic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Spammers, on the other hand, force their carrier -- Internet mail servers -- to bear 100% of the cost while receiving no compensation. Thanks to this, mail administrators are now forced to spend an enormous amount of time worrying about keeping spammers out, instead of making sure that the mail of legitimate users gets delivered. When I want to e-mail someone, I am less likely to be able to do so successfully since it's possible to get caught up in the antispam measures that have been set up on the mail server, as well as the recipient's mail client.
In sum: junk mailers pay their carriers, and contribute to the maintenance of the service. Spammers pay nothing to the mail servers, and are a significant detriment to the service.
They're both annoying as shit to the recipient, though.
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There's nothing saying you can't contract another party to receive your mail for you and junk it, in real life.
In any case, I still risk losing mail IRL because I tend to toss my junk mail, and sometimes I'll catch a random letter or bill in there... usually just as I toss it so I have to dig it out of the bin.
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The only reason mail admins HAVE to keep spam out is that people expect it.
Well, yes, of course they do. The volume of unfiltered spam coming into an e-mail inbox vastly exceeds the volume of junk mail coming into a postal mailbox. If I'm administering a commercial mail server, I'd certainly consider it to be my responsibility to ensure that the people it serves find it useful. In a corporate environment, that usefulness is pretty much nil if legitimate business e-mail is outnumbered by spam 50:1. If I were in charge of deciding my company's mail server admin, I'd absolutely insi
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It's obvious that the 50% figure is from using the "Right Hand Extraction" method (aka pulling it out of your...), but let's talk about your reasoning behind the number.
All kidding aside, the spammer only pays for access to the internet. He does not in any way,shape, or form subsidize your access to the internet.
When you pay your ISP for internet access, you are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth for data and certain amount of storage space on the mail server. When you receive spam, you are losing t
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but really that is likely to be a small part of the cost of the spam and as you say many spammers are using stolen bandwidth anyway.
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Surely a spammer pays for 50% of the cost of the bandwidth, since they pay their ISP just as you do.
No they don't pay nothing to send me spam.
If they ever did pay anything they would set there mail server up in Europe where bandwidth is dirt cheap an email me in Australia where the bandwidth is bloody expensive and then they profit from this exercise.
I pay for them to make a profit.
~Dan
Oh I forgot to mention I have to download the email from my server so I've already used triple the bandwidth they have.
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If I had my way, junk mail would be opt-in only as well.
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Easy. With snail main the sender pays for it with a stamp. With spam the sender uses other people's resource to send the mail.
Actually look at spam from your point of view as an end user spam is a bit like jumk mail. All yuo have to do is sort out the crap and toss it out. but from the ISP's point of view spam is very costly. What if the junk-mailers used fake stamps? the post office would be very upset but you would no
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Economies of scale... (Score:2)
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yes, there is. Form 1500.
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Actually, if you add up all the energy that was ever used by computers and networks to send and receive spam, I'm sure it would probably involve a fair amount of pollution and wasted energy. What percentage of a random sample of internet packets travelling through an ISPs backbone is going to be spam related? Probably quite a lot..
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The other one is virtual. The energy it costs to deliver it to you is negligible, as is the required
energy to properly dispose of it. (hit delete)
Oh yeah, also if you have a decent spam filter you will RARELY get unsolicited emails.
There is NO DECENT FILTER for snail spam.
It costs money to power the antispam machines, the extra machines needed to process the mail that gets through and wasted time of people deleting it. I used to work for an ISP/hosting joint. Small mom and pop place. 1 server would have been plenty to deal with our load, except for the spam. a couple hundred domains spam going through our mailservers forced us to cluster up to 6 machines to deal with the filtering.
I can sort my snailmail spam from real mail in a couple seconds. With electronic spam I have t
You asked for it? (Score:2)
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Ok, if this doesn't deserve +5 Funny, nothing does :D
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But why should the rest of us have to put up with Spam we don't find it useful and it costs us allot of money?
e360 vs Comcast? Yuck (Score:1, Insightful)
This is like 4chan vs. The Church of Scientolog (except that in that case I have to clarify that it's 4chan I dislike, not the people joining their campaign as "Anonymous", and the Church of Scientology I dislike, not the people who simply believe in the underlying religious philosophy).
Btw, why is it that spammers ever appear in court? Why haven't vigilantes already made it a practice to terrorize anyone who publicly acts in furtherance of spamming?
Re:e360 vs Comcast? Yuck (Score:5, Insightful)
The spammers fought back so hard, they knocked the nation of Israel off the internet (where their offices/server was), for a few days.
The lesson? Spamming is big business.
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Really, do you want to be known as the guy who harassed the spammer equivalent of the short-bus kid? Or do you want to go act out against the people generating 10-20% of all spam on the net?
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the Church of Scientology I dislike, not the people who simply believe in the underlying religious philosophy
What is the actual underlying religious philosophy? You're saying you don't mind the members but you hate the organisation? Is that something akin to not liking McDonalds, but you don't mind speaking to people who are stupid enough to consider their food worth consuming?
:p
Note: I do like other fast food places, just I always seem to end up with stomach problems after going to McDonalds, last time someone convinced me to go, I was off work for a few days.. and he was off for a couple of weeks
Official: e360 is a spammer (Score:3, Interesting)
Where does this leave spamhaus v. e360 though?
Re:Official: e360 is a spammer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Official: e360 is a spammer (Score:4, Informative)
IANAL, but actually, that's not QUITE accurate. If Spamhaus had said to begin with that the US courts lacked jurisdiction, that would have been the end of it and e360 would not have won anything. However, Spamhaus claimed in state court that the suit belonged in federal court, thus acknowledging that the federal courts had jurisdiction. THEN they didn't bother to show up in court, and lost a default judgement.
Now, whether e360 can get anything out of them is another matter entirely, but they probably could have avoided the whole mess by denying the US courts had jurisdiction in the first place...
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Seems like a fair judgement... (Score:3, Interesting)
It sounded like the judge said, basically, that the stated claims were invalid, but that the unmade claim of bad faith action by comcast may have a chance.
I've had several cases where comcast has silently blocked e-mail sent to me, where I specifically wanted to receive those e-mails.
If this is one of those companies that sends an advertisement with that little opt-out link at the bottom which is more likely to get you even more spam, then I'm all for Comcast blocking them. If this company (and I have not researched it, so I don't know much about it) does indeed require response to an opt-in e-mail prior to sending additional material, then comcast shouldn't be blocking them.
Re:Seems like a fair judgement...--SAME PROBLEM (Score:2)
I've had exactly that same problem with them, which is why I now use a free gMail account.
e360 aren't spammers. . . (Score:5, Funny)
Still, it's Comcast... (Score:2)
It's like seeing the grade school bully ace a math test.
Am I a bad person? (Score:2)
Is it wrong for me to hope that a meteorite falls on that courtroom and takes out both parties (but spares everyone else)?
I must conclude that you are a "bad person". (Score:2)
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( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (*) act of god
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 c
Kudo's to the judge (Score:2)
I'm still waiting for my judge to rule (Score:5, Interesting)
Entire details at http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam/e360/e360insight.htm [barbieslapp.com]
Their counterclaim is for calling libel (calling them a spammer and liar) and abuse of process (asking for their domain names in discovery). At the hearing struck/dismissed their abuse of process claim, and said that their paying my attorney fees for the motion is mandatory. The tentative did not strike the libel claim, but she said she would look into that further as the court needed to investigate if the supplemental request for judicial notice, containing articles quoting Linhardt in the press (Cnet and NY Times, DirectMag.com) is sufficient for limited purpose public figure status.
She denied their summary judgment motion on my claims against e360. Mostly because e360 refused to provide discovery to me, but relied upon that information in their motion. On the my libel claim against them, she denied that, except the portion saying that he implied that I hacked into his system.
Is That a Blue Moon I See? (Score:2)
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Lower taxes! Now go away and leave me alone, Mr. Troll Anonymous.
This is simple folks (Score:2, Insightful)
Why make this so complicated? It's very, very simple folks:
1. Email spam comes from hijacked computers
2. The only practical way to end spam is to either charge for sending too many emails, or to recognize hijacked computers sending too many emails and take them off the net until their behavior stops or is validated as legitimate. If the low level ISP fails to take action, the next ISP up the chain m