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AOL Awarded Millions in Spam Case 256

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yeah-bay-bee dept.
c.derby writes "MSNBC.com is running a story that says: " A Virginia federal court awarded America Online nearly $7 million in damages as part of the Internet service providers' legal victory over a junk e-mail operation, AOL said Monday." The company said the legal decision should send a warning to junk e-mailers. "This is an important legal victory in the fight against spam," Randall Boe, AOL general counsel, said in a statement. "It sends a clear, distinct message to spammers: AOL is prepared to use all of the legal and technological tools available to shut down spammers." " 145 pieces of spam so far today. Can I have a piece of the 7 million? (oops, duplicate. Oh well. It's still good ;)
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AOL Awarded Millions in Spam Case More

AOL Awarded Millions in Spam Case

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  • I never thought I'd say this... (Score:3, Funny)

    by craenor ( 623901 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:09PM (#4907606) Homepage
    But I'm soooo happy with AOL!
    • If Microsoft did this (MSN actually), would you be proud of them? Just curious. :-)
      • Well, despite the fact that I hate Microsoft like everyone else here, the act of them fighting against the loads of spam that dumps on Hotmail accounts (even Hotmail accounts that are unused and have never been given out) would be a sign that they're actually listening to their customers, and thus a Good Thing.

        • Re:I never thought I'd say this... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Ponty ( 15710 ) <awc2@buyclamsonl ... om minus painter> on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:25PM (#4907822) Homepage
          Uh, doesn't the fact that hotmail accounts that are unused get tons of spam suggest that they're not listening to their customers as much as they are selling their customer lists to spammers?

          That's, to me, decidedly not a Good Thing.
          • Uh, doesn't the fact that hotmail accounts that are unused get tons of spam suggest that they're not listening to their customers as much as they are selling their customer lists to spammers?

            What does AOL have to do with hotmail?

    • Re:I never thought I'd say this... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This wasn't a virtuous act on their part.

      When you've got that many mail accounts and that many clueless users who don't know how to avoid spam, the costs (bandwidth/storage/administration/etc...) are a massive figure. It's just good business sense for cutting a huge expense.
    • I love AOL, they send me their great cds which can be really useful as scarecrows and they also make great shotgun targets(really they do).

  • AOL is a court winner (Score:5, Funny)

    by von Prufer ( 444647 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:09PM (#4907612)
    Either AOL wins a lot of anti-spam cases in Virginia or the editors at ./ post a lot of duplicate stories.
    • Nonoono.. you got it wrong. They got awarded ANOTHER 7 million. They should be up to 14 million. ;)

    • How to fight back (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brian Kendig ( 1959 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @01:24PM (#4908296)
      I'm going to take advantage of a duplicate article, shamelessly grab a place near the top of the replies, and tell y'all how to fight back against spam.

      1. Get a cheap discarded PC and install Linux on it. Get one of those 'always-on' net connections to your home, like DSL or a cable modem. You'll need a service plan that gives you a static IP address. Register a domain name of your very own, and use dyndns.org to point your domain name at your PC. This has the added benefit of letting you host your own web site on your own domain name if you want to.

      2. Download the Exim [exim.org] mail server and install it on your PC, and set it up to accept email for you. You'll also want to set up an IMAP server so that you can fetch your email from the PC. Now you can make up any address you want on your new domain, and have mail sent to it reach you. This is great for when you need a one-time throwaway address for something.

      3. Install SpamAssassin [spamassassin.org], and also install SA-Exim [merlins.org] to link SpamAssassin with the Exim mail server. This will let the mail server identify and reject spam instead of only dealing with it after it's been accepted.

      Once you run this for a while to make sure it's doing a good job of identifying spam, turn on Sa-Exim's teergrube ('tarpit') feature. Now, when someone tries to send you spam, your mail server will hold the spammer's connection open indefinitely by sending it occasional 'keepalive' messages without ever sending an accept or a reject. Once the spammer stumbles across enough teergrubes, the mail relay he's using will hit a process limit and be unable to continue sending spam until the spammer notices and resets it or moves on to another relay.

      Teergrubing is a passive way of tying up a spammer's resources, or the resources of an open relay that's being abused by spammers. It has a negligible hit on your own resources. The more teergrubes (and honeypot web pages which feed spamtrap addresses to address harvesters) pop up out there, the harder it will be for a spammer to simply spam millions of people with the touch of a button.

      • Or get a sneakemail [sneakemail.com] account. I think Sneakemail is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

      • This showed up in my e-mail inbox today, sent from a friend. It's a little less DIY than the parent poster's solution, but it's all right too:

        Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 13:18:16 -0500

        I declare December 2, 2004 to be "the end of spam" day.

        As of December 2nd, everyone has to use a new e-mail protocol which fixes the fundamental problem of SMTP: untrusted sources.

        The new protocol isn't "new". It's just that on Dec 2, 2004, everyone should stop accepting SMTP connection that don't use the STARTTLS extension to SMTP as described in RFC2487.

        STARTTLS has the benefit of creating Received: headers that are cryptographically signed, and therefore meaningful. Internet email is sent like a bucket-brigade... you send your email to your ISP, which passes it on to another ISP, which passes it to another mail server, which sends it to final receiver's mail "Inbox". With STARTTLS, there is an audit path of who passed the email alone each "hop". There is still a possibility that you won't know who the original sender is, but you know the first ISP that let that message into the system. That's good enough.

        After Dec 2, 2004: when you receive email that is spam, you will be able to identify which server let the spam into the Internet. That site can be punished, by starting a DoS attack against it, or by declaring the site to be "terrorist" at which point the Bush Administration, which will have just won re-election (and being in its last term will have no need to follow any laws) will bomb the email server. They will be given 24 hours notice, 48 if it is a 3-day weekend. Bombing will not happen if the owner of the mail system can demonstrate which user sent the spam, and that they have been removed from the system. With the threat of being bombed, mail system administrators will be under extreme pressure to make sure that all email that leaves their systems is certifiably marked by the actual creator. (Thus fixing the "but who was the original sender?" issue). Then we can arrest the user that sent the spam.

        I encourage all countries to make it illegal to send email that is unreplyable. Thus making it possible to use "active filtering" systems, which accept email from "known good parties" and everyone else receives an automated reply saying, "If you want to get on my 'known good' list, here's how...". With STARTTLS in use, we can track down who is permitting unreplyable email into the Internet, and bomb them.

        Before Dec 2, 2004 all mail systems should begin deploying STARTTLS. It is backwards compatible with older mail systems. It doesn't require the risky and dangerous "throw the switch day" conversions like some new computer systems. While I'm at it, Wietse Venema should be gagged and bound to his computer until he merges in the "STARTTLS" patch to Postfix.

        Before Dec 2, 2004, email client authors should add features that let users see which email they would have missed if the post-Dec 2, 2004 policies had been in place. (Simply mark the message a special color if any of the Received: lines are from non-TLS systems.) This will encourage users to apply pressure to their friends to move to STARTTLS-enabled ISPs.

        Finally, you might be asking, "How did you pick December 2nd?" The answer is quite simple. It's my birthday and I can't think of a better birthday present I could receive than the end of spam.

        Can you?

        Sincerely,
        Tom Limoncelli




        Of course, read with tongue in appropriate position, ie. in cheek.
        • I'd rather have something like this [isi.edu] where the From: address is guaranteed. Additionally, it doesn't require 100% participation from all mail servers. If yahoo.com decided they wanted to implement this to prevent @yahoo.com addresses from being forged, they would be able to without requiring support from other mail servers. Essentially, anyone would be able to ask an ISP whether the mail actually came from them and from that user.

          Unfortunately this is not nearly as far along as STARTTLS. I guess STARTTLS would be better than nothing.
    • The best part about duplicate stories is if you didn't get a chance to reply the first time around, just wait a few days and you will get another chance.

      Is it my imagination, or are moderation points punishment for posting good stories (since you can't reply to stories you moderate)?

    • Yeah, I normally don't complain about dupe posts, but wasn't this posted like YESTERDAY?
      • I am guessing that you do :).
        At any rate, you should be happy that the editors let it slide from the front page before duping it... This should be seen as a big improvement :)
        • That's actually why I commented on it this time, it's the first one I've seen that was THAT close to the previous one. Normally I think the dupe posts are amusing, though normally I see them much further apart. Recently though it seems to be turning into a problem.
          • You clearly do not remember the case where a dupe was TWO stories over... BOTH of them on the front page.
            So I see this case as an improvement :)

            • You clearly do not remember the case where a dupe was TWO stories over... BOTH of them on the front page.


              I can only thank God for that ;)

  • wow! (Score:2, Funny)

    by YahoKa ( 577942 )
    This has to be the first the AOL has done that made me think well of them.

  • Would you mind saying that again? (Score:4, Funny)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:11PM (#4907640)
    I'm not sure I heard you the second time.
  • I have received... about 100 spams from AOL throw-away accounts since September 1st, 2002.

    Does that mean I can sue them for... er... US$ 3.5m?

    This being said, I am glad they won. Did I just say that? OMG... What is the world coming to if the Slashdot crowd is actually cheering AOL?

  • In related news (Score:5, Funny)

    by 2starr ( 202647 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:12PM (#4907650) Homepage
    In related news, CmdrTaco recently had to pay $0.25 to every /. reader for spamming their news pages with repeatative articles [slashdot.org].

  • hello pot? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sweeney37 ( 325921 ) <mikesweeneyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:12PM (#4907659) Homepage Journal
    In other news, the USPS has sued AOL for hurting bandwidth.

  • Anybody up for a game of dupe bingo? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dog and Pony ( 521538 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:13PM (#4907670)
    First one who guesses which one gets posted three times (has *that* happened yet?) in a row wins the right to resubmit, and get published, and given story from this site. :)

  • Good Spam/Bad Spam (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mulletproof ( 513805 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:14PM (#4907681) Homepage Journal
    And how much will the customers be awarded off of AOLs spam? Oh yeah, that's the "good" spam. Right. Forgot.

    In Soviet Russia, the stories dupe Slashdot... or something. Damn, this never gets old! Ayahahaha! Um... Nevermind.

  • Can we moderate stories now? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by goon america ( 536413 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:14PM (#4907693) Homepage Journal
    Everytime we get a dupe like this, especially the < 24 hours kind, it makes me wish we could moderate stories. This kind of thing has seems like it has been happening almost daily lately. If we could moderate a story (-1 Dupe) it would make the problem go away.

    Also, (-1 Troll) and (-1 Flamebait) would be nice, too.

    • Being able to moderate articles (+1 Interesting) and (+1 Informative) would also be useful. That way we can read at a certain level depending on how busy we are. (Slashdot readers? Busy? Wha?)

      And let's not forget (-1 Full of spelling errors)...

    • Re:Can we moderate stories now? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MadFarmAnimalz ( 460972 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:57PM (#4908063) Homepage
      I wholeheartedly agree.

      I have to sit here and look at dupes like this, and have my own submission rejected; a submission about a new law in Egypt slapping a 3 year mandatory jail term on anyone using encrypted e-mail, and a new law also criminalising wireless networking.

      Oh I wholeheartedly agree.
    • Everytime we get a dupe like this, especially the

      At first I liked this idea, but then I started thinking about it, and it's not practical.

      Mainly because slashdot is what it is because of the articles picked for our consumption by the editors, for better or worse.

      All slashdot needs is about 1 line of perl code to prevent duplicate articles (or at least, stop them most of the time, or display a warning when a duplicate is likely.

      I mean, it's not rocket science!

      However, a blog where readers submit the stories and other readers approve the stories, and other readers comment on the stories, and other readers moderate those comments... now THAT is an interesting idea, indeed!
    • In that case, CmdrTaco's karma would be rather puny. But it would be fair: CmdrTaco has been the number one dpe poster on Slashdot, and I think that should be visible: stories posted by unrepentant dupe posters should start with a lower visibility, and it would be a feedback to those dupe posters that they ought to change something in their work.

      After all, this is their job, who more than they should have some feedback on -how- they perform their job?

  • Question: (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The_Shadows ( 255371 ) <thelureofshadows AT hotmail DOT com> on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:15PM (#4907696) Homepage
    Is AOL keeping all the money and doing nothing for it's users? Or is it going to do something to redistribute it's winnings, like refunds or discounts on on-line fees for a few months?

    • Re:Question: (Score:4, Informative)

      by realdpk ( 116490 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:40PM (#4907942) Homepage Journal
      it probably costs AOL a lot more to handle spam than it does their customers, even collectively. they're hardly "doing nothing" for their users to handle spam. at the very least, they have to install a lot of mail servers to process incoming mail.
    • There is a more important question to be asked first: will the defendant ever pay the $7M ? I yet have to hear of a major spam case where the defendants didn't get away with it afterwards, one way or another.

    • Is AOL keeping all the money and doing nothing for it's users?

      They should. The spammers connected to AOL without permission and put things on their computer. OTOH, the users voluntarily connected to AOL to download their mail. It would be like getting $.10 every time you read a troll post on Slashdot.

    • Re:Question: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mr_z_beeblebrox ( 591077 )
      Is AOL keeping all the money and doing nothing for it's users? Or is it going to do something to redistribute it's winnings, like refunds or discounts on on-line fees for a few months?

      What do you think 7 Million amounts to with AOL? Refunds or discounts for a month (let alone a few) would be more than 7 million. Most presumably money from the legal department gets divied up in several ways, company profits, ongoing litigation and I would bet in this case to the war on spam. So, in that respect even the fact that they won the money IS something for their subscribers, but I doubt they will see a penny of it.

    • Re:Question: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nochops ( 522181 )
      Good guestion.
      This reminds me abut the "no sales calls" list that I pay $10/year to be part of. If I'm on the list, and I get a sales call, that person is fined roughly $10k per offense, but I see exactly $0.00 of that $10k. Why is that? I'm the one who was inconvenienced by the sales call, right? I'm the one who paid to be on the list, right?
    • Is AOL keeping all the money and doing nothing for it's users? Or is it going to do something to redistribute it's winnings, like refunds or discounts on on-line fees for a few months?

      they plan on redistributing the funds by providing 1000 free hours to their service, look for your package in the mail.

      Mike
    • Is AOL keeping all the money and doing nothing for it's users? Or is it going to do something to redistribute it's winnings, like refunds or discounts on on-line fees for a few months?

      I think the plan is to send out even more free coasters/cd cases. It is so wonderful that they are planning on rewarding even non-customers like me!

  • What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by solostring ( 620535 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:15PM (#4907699) Homepage
    No offence, but this is becoming a joke. How many dupes a week/day/hour are we up to nowadays? If the 'powers that be' don't even bother reading their own site, then why the hell don't they pass their mod status to someone who cares.

  • hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:15PM (#4907707)
    CmdrTaco has been so busy with his new wife that he hasn't had time to read his own website. Kudos to Rob, living it up in conjugal bliss! In the meantime, maybe you should ask your coworkers when you come back from a night of playing "hide the potato sack" what they have posted over the last couple of days. Just an idea.
  • This story [slashdot.org] says that AOL got over $7 Million in a court case yesterday!

    Wow, these guys might become profitable through worthwhile, even noble, court actions!

    BRAVO AOL! BRAVO FEDERAL COURTS! (this time)

  • Spam About Spam? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:16PM (#4907711) Homepage Journal
    Is this some sort of performance-art piece? A spam about spam [slashdot.org]?

    Next, I'll expect 1,024 identical stories about a Beowulf cluster.
  • And the /. crowd is always crowing about their convoluted AI spam killers? Geez, Taco, you're letting us down. Wait, didn't Spamassassin come on that free TiBook bribe^H^H^H^H^Hdemo that you got from Apple?
  • this will prolong their filing of chapter 11 a lil longer :P
  • Hey, spam is a minor annoyance, but come on...$7 million? Why does everyone hate spam THAT much? I mean, while you're griping about it, or writing those clever "spam filters" that never work, you could be volunteering in your community.

    There's a lot of people out of a job this Christmas-maybe it's time to change your priorities and lose (not loose) the smug demeanor at least for a few weeks.

  • Now all we need is... (Score:4, Funny)

    by PaulGrimshaw ( 605950 ) <mail&paulgrimshaw,com> on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:23PM (#4907795) Homepage
    AOL to get fined for sending out spam CDs and the world will be a better place.
    • Oh you're complaining about AOL cd's are you?

      I live a few blocks away from a 54,000 seat football stadium, and AOL sponsored a match. They handed out a cd to every single person in the sellout crowd.

      Now, do you want to imagine what my street, front yard, and local shopping mall + car park looked like? Soooo many friggin CD's littered on the ground, it produced a psychedelic effect that crack smoking Taco couldn't possibly imagine in his wildest dreams.

  • Burnout (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Schlemphfer ( 556732 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:24PM (#4907811) Homepage
    I make a point of reading slashdot a couple times a day, and it seems the duplications lately have gotten totally out of hand. I recall three duplicate posts in the same day not so long ago, which is inexcusable. As somebody who runs a website with near-daily content, I completely understand. I think Taco and the gang are developing a bad case of burnout, and some new blood might help fix things.

    The exact same thing happens with magazine editors, who generally burn out and leave within three years of taking the top job. There's just something in the nature of publishing new stuff all the time that, for most people (Lewis Lapham and the top-shelf magazine editors excepted), seems to create all kinds of problems.

    Well, enough griping--a solution would be easy. Either:

    1) Taco and the other burnouts concentrate on creating a viable business model, and allow some enthusiastic fresh blood in to post stories. This would be harder than it sounds, as finding smart people you can trust to post relevant stuff isn't easy.

    or

    2) A small group of daily readers is assembled, whose job is to check stories for possible dupes before they get posted on the main page.

    A solution to Slashdot's increasing lack of professionalism would be easy. And it's well past time.

    • Re:Burnout (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
      2) A small group of daily readers is assembled, whose job is to check stories for possible dupes before they get posted on the main page.

      Actually, seeing the complexity of the system they've built already, it would be ABSOLUTELY TRIVIAL TO WRITE A SCRIPT TO DETECT DUPES. The site posts no more than 10 stories a day, that's hardly an overwhemlming amount of data to work with. Start by comparing cited URLs. That'd find 50% of the dupes right away. The rest might be found by (as the editors can't be fucked to scan the list of stories using thei own eyes) running them by news.google and seeing if they come up with any others under the same heading.

      A solution to Slashdot's increasing lack of professionalism would be easy. And it's well past time.

      Too right. And Taco's "oops, duplicate. Oh well. It's still good" is just insulting to the readers and shows he needs a long holiday, or maybe it's time for him to move on.

  • Google should take this thing over. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:27PM (#4907836) Homepage
    Yet another duplicate story.

    Maybe, when VA Whatever finally goes bust, Slashdot will be taken over by Google News and totally automated. That might be an improvement.

    It wouldn't be hard. Google News can pick stories and can tell which articles go together. Just provide a set of selection criteria that match previous Slashdot history, and let it feed the Slashdot story engine.

    When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do? - bus poster, 1970s

  • I am a little confused here, if you know the story is a duplicate story, why post it? Why not pull it? People make mistakes, which is fine, but why not correct them? Not trying to tell you how to run the site, just a suggestion...

  • On the duplicate issue .... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by airrage ( 514164 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:30PM (#4907865) Homepage Journal
    Yes, the exact same story was posted yesterday, but obviously there is method in their madness. Since the first story came out at 5 PM (CST), I'm assuming that the East Coast had already gone home for the day.

    That same story of course would still be "fresh" for the Westies. So, in getting around this whole we-live-left-to-right instead of north-to-south issue, we need to repost some stories from time to time. Naturally, a good, fresh story that has gone "stale", may be, reposted to let those Easties catch up with the rest of us.

    I'm sure there is an algorith that could take in the time it was posted, time left to view in the normal working hours, etc.

    So the next time /. reposts a story, realize that there are those that are less fortunate... :)
  • This was the last story I read on /. this evening, and when I log in this morning, it's the first story I see.
    I thought I was stuck with a cached copy of /., but everything else seemed to work, so I stormed into my sysadmin's office asking him why he was being so arbitrarily mean.
    Had to walk out with a sheepish expression when I realized that I was complaining about something that was probably a dupe.
  • How fast can you say "DUPE" around here????

    Or does it seems that "DUPE!" is rapidly replacing "FIRST POST" around here????

    Inquiring minds want to know.

  • He just got back from his honeymoon and was probably distracted with.... umm.......

    Divying up the souvenirs he bought us! Thats right.

    I look forward to getting my dr_dank keychain from Vegas.
  • If this case were the precedent for a multi million dollar, class action suit against those people that send out all those CDs in the mail.

    Ah,sweet irony

  • Now AOL should go on SNL (Score:4, Funny)

    by sawilson ( 317999 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:43PM (#4907957) Homepage
    Going on SNL is a great way to make the people
    think you are "hip" and "cool" and not as bad
    as everybody thought you were. It totally worked
    for Al Gore. AOL should hire Al Gore's agent.
    • Going on SNL is a great way to make the people think you are "hip" and "cool" and not as bad as everybody thought you were.

      Someone tell Trent Lott. He thinks he can improve his image by making an ass of himself on BET.

  • Should I be happy about spammers losing millions or sad about AOL winning court cases? It's difficult. :)
  • Do I hear an echo, or is there any new news here?

  • OSDN announces new web site (Score:3, Funny)

    by Snork Asaurus ( 595692 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:50PM (#4908015) Journal
    The test and eval period on Slashdot is over and OSDN is pleased to announce a new web site.

    If you're looking for Old News for bored Nerds. Stuff that's been said already.

    Point your browsers to Slashdupe.com [slashdupe.com] All dupes all the time.

    First story up at Slashdupe: Amelia Earhart Missing

  • A suggestion to avoid duplicates (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:50PM (#4908019)
    Come on Taco, you guys can code. Simply write a routine to do some sort of word comparison between the story you're publishing, and say the last week's worth of stories. Any stories with a number of matches above a certain threshold would show you the list of "similar" articles. You could then probably tell from the headline alone if the story you're posting is a duplicate or not. How tough would that be?
    • (not my idea, but..) why not just have links within the story compared to previous stories? Seems like this would be pretty accurate and cut down on 80% of the dupes.

  • Glad I'm not a /. subscriber (Score:3)

    by emarkp ( 67813 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMroadq.com> on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @12:58PM (#4908073) Journal
    Cause I'd be pissed at the low value. This is pathetic. I mean, do the editors even read this site?

    Enough is enough. Time to check out osnews [osnews.com] and ditch slashdot. I know I'm not the first to get tired of the repetition, but it's time someone starts calling for the mass exodus.

    • I would subscribe if better news was posted. As it stands now, you can submit a truly remarkable piece of news that everyone here would want to know about only to have it rejected immediately. Then, 5 minutes later, you see a dupe go up, or some crap about a book, or the next horrible "interview" by that one editor that writes like a 10th grader. I come here for the discussion with my peers, which is great. I don't care for the editor's writings. For real news I go to newsfactor.com or kur05hin.

  • This is not a victory at large... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by smack_attack ( 171144 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @01:00PM (#4908088) Homepage
    Duplicate story, duplicate post [slashdot.org]:

    IMHO, this is a victory for AOL users, spammers are going to scramble now to delete %@aol.com from their databases, but that's about the extent of it.

    Once a backbone provider (like Level3 or %Bell%) gets up the gusto to throw this kind of lawsuit at spammers (and offshore spammers), we may actually see some reprieve.

    Until then... "So easy to avoid spam, no wonder it's number one!"
  • I dunno Taco, are you an AOL user?
  • So who wants to take on the task of creating a site for what slashdot used to be?

    I could have never fathomed a world where a news site had duplicate articles still on the main page!

    How can we think this is anything but a ploy to reduce server load?

    How can a site with such popularity have editors that don't even read the site?
  • c. derby:

    If you've got the much spam already today, you've got problems. Either you're giving out your email address to too many p0rn sites, or you haven't figured out to mask your email in newsgroups. Most spammers get email addresses from newgroup post headres. I used to get at least 20 spams a day, or more. Now I changed my email a few years ago, and used -NOSPAM@domain.net in my email address for newsgroups, and I only get about 3 per day (hardly noticeable). And if I'm not sure of a website's credibility, I give them my hotmail address. (which incidentally, now gets tons of SPAM. most likely due to the fact that I give it out all the time).

  • Duplicate stories seem to appear about every other day these days. Is this supposed to make me want to read the site, click on the ads, and post anything but trolls? Crapflooding is for ACs, not editors.

  • BBC Report (Score:2, Informative)

    by jt007 ( 459122 )

    Here is the BBC's slant on things. [bbc.co.uk]

  • 7 million dollars? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ender-iii ( 161623 )
    You're happy with AOL? Well I'm happy with Spam Interceptor [si20.com]. I don't need 7 million dollars to stop spammers.
  • The most interesting part of this story was the link at the bottom, IE has a flaw where you can be owned by viewing a PNG [msnbc.com]. Curious that this wasn't reported on slashdot so far, I sense a 'Submit Story' link calling my name...

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