Dictionary Spammer Fined $55,000 for Spam Attack 184
Lawrence_Bird writes "In a first, a Japanese district court has ordered
a spammer to pay restitution to NTT DoCoMo for abuse of their imode system. 'The damage caused by large amounts of e-mail not reaching their destinations should be covered by the sender,' said the judge. The fine is about $55,000 and was based on an estimated cost to NTT of 1.2 yen per undelivered spam ($0.01) for the 4 million spams that were undeliverable. What is most startling is NTT DoCoMo assertion that of the 950 million emails
they receive each day, 880 million are not deliverable!"
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to see this guy fined per DELIVERABLE message aswell though.
Re:Great (Score:2)
Re:Great (Score:1)
How would you feel if you were jailed for jaywalking to set an example? People ought to be punished for what they did onl
Re:Great (Score:2)
Re:Great (Score:1)
Kierthos
Re:Great (Score:1)
They should certainly be prevented from engaging in such trade ever again - and given some stiff reasons not to.
They are people too- so why cant they take responsibility for their actions. Its just governments and large corporations that get to complain about taking responsibility for their actions...
Re:Great (Score:2)
Now unless you have something like the USA fax law, you are probably would have hard time winning(IANAL).
Also for your own sake it would take a large amount of messages before it would profitable to collect athat 1.2yen for each message.
Re:Great (Score:2)
This happened in Japan and i-Mode is a telephone service for which customers pay for receiving mail, ie not a free service. Note that the judge based the fine on possible revenue losses and not on howmuch docomo actually spent per invalid email (apparently 1.2 yen/mail). So aa similar ruling will leave out free fonemail services, let alone free webbased mail services. IANAL!IANAL!!
Re:Great (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you kidding? This will encourage more spam. The spammers are saying, "they only got fined $55,000? That's decent ROI. Let's spam DoCoMo!"
Good! (Score:1)
wow (Score:2, Funny)
Re:wow (Score:1)
"880 million" (Score:5, Informative)
Rus
Re:"880 million" (Score:2)
Re:"880 million" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"880 million" (Score:1)
Re:"880 million" (Score:2, Informative)
Learn the lingo sonny -- this isn't your grandmother's news site ...
Re:"880 million" (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, my cell plan's email addy is my 10-digit phone number+@+my phone company. It's easy for spammers to just send to every possible cellphone number. I would think that they (the cellphone company) would allow you to add either a prefix or suffix to the number, to keep down spam. I guess this is why they don't charge for the first 2500 sms messages received each month - to keep down complaints.
Re:"880 million" (Score:1)
Oh the irony.
Re:"880 million" (Score:2)
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Nasdaq 5000 Here we come! (Score:1, Funny)
good (Score:2)
Re:good (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm. Not to come across too harsh or anything, but you _really_ should test these things. Rather than just assuming that it wasnt "accesible to the open", you should telnet to your mail server and test the possible relay methods, or at the very least, register with abuse.net and let their online tester do the work for you.
As you have no doubt seen, getting a server off ORBS and the like is really a LOT more hassle than testing in the first place. Additionally; as you say "[i]t's about time people realise that stuff like this has very real consequences..." This works both ways. If you don't secure your systems, they _will_ be taken advantage of, and next time it will be Company X suing you for permitting your mail server to be used in spamming them and not just Company X suing the spammer.
Re:good (Score:2)
Incidentally, it took around 10 hours before we were found...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:good (Score:2)
Mobile phone spammers (Score:1)
Basically the spammer was trying to send large amounts of spam to Docomo's mobile phone users. Mobile phone users are charged for receiving emails. Since 1) many of the spammed users don't exist and 2) it was unsolicited commercial email, it only makes sense for the spammer to pay!
I say we should send these morons a one-way ticket to Iraa muahahahaha!!
Damn! (Score:1)
Re:Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
I think you'll find they're just being blackholed. *rimshot*
Ew. I really wish I hadn't just used the syllable "rim" in that context.
A great precedent! (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus they got zapped for undelivered email - avoids the whole "opt in/opt out" argument (difficult to prove always that someone didn't accidentally "opt in" at SOME point and you KNOW the spammer is going to claim that they did) AND it also is likely far more costly than targetted spam attacks. (If you send to a 90 percent valid email list chances are you are sending to a few hundred thousand addresses. You do a dictionary attack you are sending to MILLIONS of addresses... which would you rather see them get charged cash for?)
It's a good start if you ask me (though of course part of me thinks that locking them in a small room with one angry ferret per 1000 emails would be a good way too... but that might be going too far. Probably. I mean, think of the poor ferrets?)
Bvardi
Re:A great precedent! (Score:1)
playing devils advocate again - but isnt that exactly what is being used for coelition propaganda, and wasnt this also used in afgan?
After the humanitarian crisis, someones gonna have to clear away all those damn leaflets..
Re:A great precedent! (Score:4, Funny)
How about something more like a reality-TV show? For every 100/1000 spams sent... they spend one day on a deserted island. The island has water... but little food.
Eventually... we can wait until they turn on each other, or start suffering from malnutrition, whatever.
Disclaimer: I strongly dislike "reality TV", but I'd buy a dish and PPV just to see a bunch of miserable spammers shipped to some godforsaken remote destination
Re:A great precedent! (Score:4, Insightful)
It would even waggle the magic word 'ROI' in front of the exec's, so why isnt it happening yet??
Re:A great precedent! (Score:2)
100% accurate filters? It's possible to have software that's pretty damn good, but the best filter is a sentient human, and even they aren't 100%. Nonintelligent software cannot adapt the way humans can; when the spammers think up new ways to disguise their email, the software isn't going to adapt itself. Only when (if) we have sentient, general-purpose AIs will we be able to have something that's close enough to 100% so that we can leave it running and never have to maintain i
Not deliverable? How about, not readable! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not on slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not on slashdot (Score:1)
Undeliverable SPAM = DOS attack.... (Score:1)
Let the lawsuits begin!
-ProzacGod
Dictionary Spam = DoS Attack (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dictionary Spam = DoS Attack (Score:2)
Not quite. a DoS has NO intention whatsoever of having the messages get to valid users. This had a small hope of it. Moreover, the intent to make the service unavailable for others wasn't there.
Sanchez, is your cleaning procedure running? (Score:2)
[lounge]
Now that's what I call a lazy database admin!
*rimshot*
[/lounge]
In related news........ (Score:2)
It's about time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Many people don't realize what a hassle spam can be, until you try to put a monetary cost on it. Let's forget about the resources it uses and just look at how much time it consumes to delete... For the sake of using round numbers, let's say it takes someone 5 seconds to identify a message as spam and delete it. That means in an hour they can theoretically delete 720 pieces of spam. I don't know about the rest of you, but I regularly receive about 100 pieces of spam on a typical day. That means that about 2.6% of your paycheck goes towards you deleting spam. For an employee that makes $50k/year, this comes out to approximately 3.5 cents per piece of spam received, or $1277/year...
Re:It's about time... (Score:1)
This is why it's hard to estimate the cost of such things-5 seconds to identify spam?? I'm not a fast reader, but I can pretty easily identify a spam subject header in under 1 second. If I'm using a decent spam-filter, I can reduce the amount of daily spam I see to 5-10. The first observation drops
Re:It's about time... (Score:3, Insightful)
5 seconds??? Are you insane? Look at your watch. Now wait 5 seconds. That's an eternity. Why on Earth would it take anyone that long to look at an email and determine "Hey, who the %*#@ is this and why are they emailing me about penis creme?"
Personally, I can scan through a list of email subjects and senders (i.e., the folder - don't even need to see the messages' contents) and identify spam by the dozens. Even still, for the
Re:It's about time... (Score:1)
Estimating 250 posts on this article with 100 times more readers than posters, as well as further posts relating to the parent comment, I figure that there is
(250 posts + 25000 readers)*7 seconds reading time + (3 posts after this one*25250 readers)*20 seconds reading time
= 1691750 seconds
Assuming that I can identify a spam in 1 second and charging you 1 cent per spam, you are directly responsible for $16917.50 in losses. I will forward this total to my Nigerian c
Re:It's about time... (Score:2)
It costs more than that. I don't particularly want to see pictures of women covered in horse semen when I get home from work and check my email -- or worse yet, when I'm at work and my screen is visible to a half dozen other people.
Because then they're spendi
Dealing with dictionary attacks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dealing with dictionary attacks (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dealing with dictionary attacks (Score:2)
OUCH. (Score:2)
This is why some busy websites choose to disable keepalives or set the keepalive timeout to something short like 1 second. If the webserver keeps that connection
If Only (Score:2)
Anybody have a link on how to configure sendmail to not log/respond to email destined for addresses that are not on your server?
Sweet Sweet Justice (Score:2)
Re:Sweet Sweet Justice (Score:2)
Re:Sweet Sweet Justice (OFFTOPIC) (Score:2)
I just got back from a trip to NYC. I went to Liberty Island and remembered that it was recently-reviled France who gave us our mos
Cost of spam? (Score:1)
The fine is about $55,000 and was based on an estimated cost to NTT of 1.2 yen per undelivered spam ($0.01) for the 4 million spams that were undeliverable. What is most startling is NTT DoCoMo assertion that
If this is true, doesn't that make the cost of spam to NTT DoCoMo around $12M per day, or $4.4Billon per year.
This seems a bit much, although I agree with the size of the fine - I'm just questioning the way it is rationalized.
- Bria
Say no to excessive "costs" (Score:5, Interesting)
The article says 880 million undeliverable emails are sent every day. At a penny a piece, that's USD$8.8million / day, or $3.2 billion/year. The company does $42 billion [morningstar.com] in sales per year, I doubt that they spend 7.6% of their income on spam. Or, for that matter, give me $3b/yr and I'll provide the equipment to totally filter all of their undeliverable mail -- they'll save their shareholders $200 million!.
I just wish they said "it cost us 1 man-year of work to stop this guy" and cost it that way instead of making up numbers per message. It's this kind of unjustified damage estimate that "cost" sun $80 million [wired.com] of money that was good enough to tell a judge under oath, but too bogus to tell their shareholders. A doubt NTT has a $3.2b line-item on their annual report.
(and, as others have pointed out, this 880milMsg/day is misaddressed mail - trivial to filter out and it never consume any expensive RF bandwidth)
Re:Say no to excessive "costs" (Score:2)
What will come? (Score:2)
On a somewhat related note, while we may not see opt-in mandated for a while, I'm sure companies will be quick to adapt:
By signing up for our free Britney Spears subscription service, you ackwnoledge you have agreed to our draconian privacy policy [127.0.0.1] which allows us to sell your personal data to anybody we want and spam you from now 'till doomsday. To activate your account, we will send you an e-mail shortly. The spamming will begin soon thereafter.
This is one of the reasons why legislating a technical p
Who would have thought... (Score:2)
Who would have thought that Larry Bird would be spending his retirement years posting on Slashdot...
money FROM Spammers (Score:1)
way down in Do Co Mo
(with apologies, but not royalties to the Beach Boys)
telco was happy to profit from delivering the spam (Score:2)
Had the spammer used valid email addresses I'm sure this would not have ended up in court.
General question about spam (Score:1)
Re:General question about spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:3, Insightful)
Sending unsolicited e-mail is NOT a legitimate business practice. Sending unsolicited e-mail is closer to harassment than it is to legitimate communication.
If your theory held, then people wouldn't get spammed with crap like penis/breast enlarging cream, ugoslavian tractor deals, or offers to become ordained ministers - they would get spam about things that INTERESTED THEM, 100% of the time.
You are confusing the issue, by assuming that all businesses have a right to free (a
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:1)
I hate them. I also hate tightfisted pwople. I do accept they have ar right to exist though
If your theory held, then people wouldn't get spammed with crap like penis/breast enlarging cream, ugoslavian tractor deals, or offers to become ordained ministers - they would get spam about things that INTERESTED THEM, 100% of the time.
No other advertising is 100% accurately targetted.
You are confusing the issue, by assuming that all businesses have a right to free (as in
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:2)
'Advertising is targeted communication with your audiance. Spam is Blind-Monkey-Flailing at anyone who is listening.'
was the full quote
now
'Why do I keep seeing ads that assume I'm a 60 year old woman then?'
You are agreeing with me, which both nullifies your argument, and makes you look the fool. Since the spam you recieve is not even in the NEAR ballpark of your interests
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:2)
*blink*
Your marketing department needs a dictionary :-) The term "opt-out" typically means "We add anything with an @ sign in it to the mailing list, and we spam the bejeezus it until it begs to be removed, and we might continue to spam it later."
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:2)
No
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:2)
Thanks for the clarification. My biggest concern wasn't necessarily what you were doing, but that you didn't know the difference. (Amazing how often that happens in F500 companies, innit? :)
> Sorry for the confusion .. when this program first started a contracter told the marketing department that we would default opt-out people .. with the definition of opt-out m
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:1)
I'm operating on the same business model as the spammer, so you have to pay for this reply.
Uh... (Score:1)
Blocking software for a mobile phone?
You are aware, I trust, that the email clients for these phones are built in, and cannot really be user modified, right?
>
You mean, like, the phone book?
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:1)
Spammers have the right to conduct their business if they follow local laws. He did not, I dare say most do not.
"If you don't want to receive his advertisements, then stop being so tight fisted and get some blocking software."
Every person who uses email should spend money to stop UNWANTED UCE's? That seems a bit ridiculous. What blocking software would you recommend to the ISP that got stuck with all the undeliverable mail?
I would like to see (it wi
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN AS A "FUCKING MORON" (Score:1)
I can only hope that one day you smoke a turd in hell.
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN AS A "FUCKING MORON" (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN AS A "FUCKING MORON" (Score:1)
Spam will never go away. Most people don't want it. Wouldn't it be nice if all UCE's were required to be marked in a very plain and simple manner AND this marking must not be obscured, altered or omitted. Mail could be filtered at the ISP level at the customers request. If this were to come about people who omitted or altered this mark or circumvented filtering i
Re:"defending other bulk emailers right (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The difference is choice (Score:1)
They'r not. The money goes to the telephoj company. If you don't like that find a provider that doesn't charge you to receive messages
Why? Tell me why you have to get messages that you don't want. What was it in the contract that said "random third parties will be legally permitted to send you ads at your expense"?
It's implicit. The phone company would be in breach of contract if they didn't deliver the message. If you have a problem with this, ge
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The difference is choice (Score:1)
Refuse delivery then. Nobody is forcing you to receive the ad. Just reject any message that you are charged for.
There is none. It costs the provider money to deliver the message and they charge the users.
This is because people are willing to pay for this service. It would be just as viable a business model for the telephone companies to charge the sender.
No, it is not implicit. Why would they offer an
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The difference is choice (Score:1)
By refusing to pay for a service that sends you text messages in exchange for a fee. You don't know what's in a receiver paid-for letter before you pay for it
No it would not. There would be the costs associated with processing credit cards, getting the sender to agree to a click-thru contract, etc....It looks very unprofessional to have a colleague, client, or employer pay to send you a message.
Yikes! Talk about over-complicating matters. How about
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The difference is choice (Score:2)
that someone is sending a message to non verified message delivery system provided by your telco, and you pay for the privilidge to receive messages that might be sent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN AS A "FUCKING MORON" (Score:1)
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN AS A "FUCKING MORON" (Score:1)
Well, you're wrong then. I don't love spam. I don't love SUV's either. I simply choose not to buy an SUV, or any car from a company that targets these things to the general public. I don't love the exploitation of workers in third world coutries, which is why I make sure I only buy products that I can be reasonably sure are exploitation free.
I just happen to like the free market.
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN AS A "FUCKING MORON" (Score:1)
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN AS A "FUCKING MORON" (Score:2)
Bullshit. The right to swihng your arms around ends where my face starts. There is a right to speech, but there is also a right not to listen. Sorry, if I don't want to listen to you, you don't have a right to scream in my face.
The problem is that spammers go out of their way to avoid having their emails screened out. They don't have the right to FORCE their crap down my throat, but they go out of their way to forcefeed their shit to the recipients, by deliberately goi
Re: (Score:2)
Re:ARE YOU ON DRUGS? (Score:1)
No but many of us are charged for the minutes of airtime used by telemarketers.
"If I was paying someone to provide a service of throwing messages wrapped round bricks through my car window, I wouldn't complain if they did this. I would have cause to complain if they didn't."
What the hell does this mean?
The post you are replying to is pointing out that SPAMMERS and telemarketers are costing people money.
Re:ARE YOU ON DRUGS? (Score:1)
What service are you referring to? I pay my ISP for mail service for my personal use not for people to send me garbage that I don't want. My ISP pays somebody for bandwidth to be used by their customers. Very few people want this type of email or commercial phone messages. It wastes resources (money). The only people who defend these practices are profiting from it. I suppose that if I was making my living by wasting others money, I would also view
Re:ARE YOU ON DRUGS? (Score:1)
Really? I want a provider that will agree to send me only email that I want. Who are you with? My agreement says that the ISP will deliver messages that are addressed to me.
Very few people want this type of email or commercial phone messages.
Some people do though.
The only people who defend these practices are profiting from it.
I never made any profit from spam.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:They only have themslves to blame (Score:1)
I understand that the spammers send so many of these emails that even with an incredibly low response rate, they make money. I could open a business and make money too if I could use everyone else resources.
Nooo! (Score:2)
Re:sheesh (Score:1)
You bothered to look it up? We're a lighthouse, your call.
Re:Maybe this is the method need for spam control (Score:2, Insightful)
Paid undeliverable outgoing mail, however, might just work. It doesn't require the collaboration of other companies in a cartel-type form. While it doesn't require cooperation, it does require a giant like AOL to implement it before everyone else will follow.
There is precedent for stuff like this. In video games, EA to