Correction: Spam-Lawsuit Story
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In an Aug. 29 story about a permanent injunction against a Rhode Island man who sent unsolicited text messages to Verizon Wireless cell phone customers, The Associated Press erroneously reported the date of the federal court action. The injunction was granted Aug. 23, not Aug. 27.
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An unsolicited marketing message irritates an Edinburgh man and earns its sender a lawsuit -- and a $1,445 fine for damages. Is your inbox a gold mine? By the Associated Press.
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By Christopher Schwarzen, Seattle Times  CORRECTION: Clarification: Information in this article, originally published May 23, was corrected June 1.
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By JAYMES SONG  HONOLULU - For many Americans, spam is a four-letter word for unwanted e-mail. In Hawaii, Spam is a beloved comfort food, with cans of the gelatinous pork bricks found in virtually every cupboard.
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One of the world's largest "spam" e-mail operations was served with a lawsuit on Thursday seeking several million dollars in damages for sending out misleading electronic messages over the Internet, the Texas attorney general said.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has filed two lawsuits over the past weeks looking to crack down on spam on its Windows Live Hotmail network. The "John Doe" lawsuits were filed against unknown alleged spammers who had been sending large quantities of spam advertising debt relief and adult Web sites to Hotmail accounts. Microsoft alleges that a company doing business under the name Consumer Solutions Network sent "misleading, deceptive, and unsolicited commercial e-mails advertising debt relief help to Windows Live Hotmail account holders." The spam contained subject lines such as "Michelle, accounts over the limit," or "Robert, Payment not received," the suit alleges. Consumer Solutions Network, which could not be reached for comment on this story, operates several Internet domains including myfinancialsolutions.org, consumersolution.org, and financialsolutionsonline.org, according to Microsoft. Microsoft has also sued unnamed defendants for sending spam that promoted pornographic Web sites through Hotmail. Microsoft claims that these spammers not only flooded Hotmail accounts with unwanted messages, but also used Hotmail itself to send large volumes of spam. "Many of defendants' illegal e-mail messages were sent using ... accounts obtained through false or fraudulent pretenses," Microsoft claims. Companies like Microsoft, AOL, and Earthlink have launched a large number of these lawsuits in recent years, said Venkat Balasubramani, the principal of Balasubramani Law, and author of the Spam Notes blog. "They serve a deterrent purpose, and they also can be a mechanism for investigation. You can issue subpoenas and dig around a little bit to find what's going on," he said. Microsoft has filed such lawsuits on an almost-monthly basis over the past year, he added. In April and May of this year it filedÂ similar lawsuits against several alleged stock scammers. These latest lawsuits were filed in King County Superior Court in Seattle. The Consumer Solutions Network lawsuit was filed on June 13. The suit relating to pornographic spam was filed on Tuesday of this week.
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A spammer whom authorities say e-mailed more than 9 billion unwanted advertisements for products like erection pills faces a hefty fine: If he needs headache medication or debt relief there's probably an unsolicited ad in his own inbox.
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I think I know how spammers are going to enter the Twitter world. It'll come in the form of replies, which basically function like email. You can direct a message with a url to anyone as long as you know their username. Here's a screen shot that illustrates spam being sent to a hypothetical user. I didn't send it of course.  Another problem, the destination of the url is likely masked through the use of a shortener so the user could be clicking through to some really nasty place, with no way of knowing in advance that's where they're going. (Such messages probably wouldn't alert you in advance that they're about meds or poker or sex.) The press and bloggers will run stories saying "Spam Comes to Twitter" and they'll be right, even though it won't be the main part of Twitter. Users will expect the company to do something about it, but I don't see what they can do other than eliminate the feature. Users will certainly want the ability to completely opt-out of replies.
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A screensaver targeting spam-related websites appears to have been too successful.
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Said the accused violated the &quot;CAN-SPAM&quot; federal law requiring e-mail containing sexually explicit images to be clearly identified.
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The majority of spam mailings received around the world originate from the United States according to software company Sophos. In order to compile their list, company researchers monitored all spam messages that were sent to their network during 2004.
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Siblings are the first ever to be convicted for sending boatloads of junk e-mail pushing bogus products. Also: Microsoft takes MSN music download on a Euro trip....  Nokia begins legal battle against European counterparts.... and more.
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It&#39;s an ill wind, as they say. If you believe the word on the anti-spam lists, Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Ivan have all disrupted one of Florida&#39;s major internet businesses: spamming.
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There's an old parable that goes like this:A man is sentenced to death by the king. In desperation, he asks that his life be spared if he can teach a pig to sing. The king agrees, and gives the man a year. Walking the man back to his cell, a guard comments that it seems like a foolish bargain; he doesn't really expect to be able to do it, does he? The man replies, "A lot can happen in a year. The king could die. I could die. Or who knows, maybe the pig will learn to sing."(Maybe it's an allegory. Or a fable. I can never keep these things straight.)I'm using the pig story to segu&#233; into Bayesian spam filters. But first, a quick trip back to spam filters in general. E-mail spam has been around for a while, and different schemes have been developed to determine whether a piece of e-mail is (probably) legit, or whether it's spam. One way is to create a blacklist of senders: Nothing from, say, 123junk.com is allowed into your inbox. Another is a whitelist: If you aren't an approved sender (e.g., mom, dad, Cousin Jimmy), you're mail won't go through. A third is the 'word search,' which looks for the kinds of words that rarely make it into a legitimate e-mail: "Viagra" springs to mind, and there are plenty of others that can't be printed on a family Web site. All of these anti-spam techniques have problems, mostly because they were either too narrowly focused to be effective, or because they were too easy for spammers to get around.But then came a different kind of spam filter - one based on the work of an obscure mathematician from the 18th century. One that works.Reverend TomThomas Bayes was an English Presbyterian minister and mathematician who lived from 1702 to 1761 in and near London. He only published two things while he was alive: a paper that tried to prove that God wants everyone to be happy, and another defending the accuracy of the calculus. After he died, though, is when Bayes's most important work was published. Called "Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances," it was discovered by an acquaintance (one Richard Price, for those of you who like the details) who sent it to the Royal Society which published it in its Philosophical Transactions in 1763.Out of that paper came what's called Bayes's Rule or Bayes's Theorem. It's a formula for guessing how likely it is that something will happen based on two or more independent events. Imagine you want to know what the chances of your 1986 Toyota Corolla making it cross country. Some "independent events" that might stop you are your engine failing, your transmission failing, your tires failing, and so on.To apply Bayesian probability here, you would figure the odds of each of those things, then input those numbers into Bayes's formula (which, by the way, is fairly simple). Let's say you figure the chance of your engine failing is 10%, the chance of your transmission failing is 15%, and the chance of your tires failing is 30%. Popping the numbers into Rev. Tom's formula tells you that the chance of your trip being ruined by any one of these things is actually less than 1%. Happy trails.(Is this counterintuitive? Maybe. Check out another example at Process Software.In 2002, Paul Graham changed the spam war forever when he published an article called "A Plan for Spam". In it, he demonstrated how Bayes's work could be used to sort out spam from legitimate e-mail.Instead of calculating the odds of whether your car will make it across the country, Graham used Bayesian techniques to determine how likely a piece of mail is to be spam. It bases this on how likely each word is to be in a spam message.(By the way, the word "word" is misleading. Bayesian filters also take into account things like Web links, text colors, and font size.)Thus, the more spam messages (and good messages) you get, the more information a Bayesian filter has and the better it gets at identifying junk. A lot of very good anti-spam products are based on Bayesian techniques.And they work very, very well.Basic trainingFirst, a Bayesian filter has to be trained; you need to tell it these are legit messages and these are spam. (Every Bayesian filter has a simple way to do this, usually by having you put all your spam in one mailbox. It then scans that Spam box for spam, and your Inbox for legit mail.)The filter looks at the words in every message to get an idea of what spam looks like. For example, if the word "buy" appears in 100 spam messages and only one legit message, it might be given a score of .99 - there's a 99% chance a message with "buy" in it is spam.On the other hand, the word "column" would (for me) be the opposite; it might appear in 99 legit messages and only one spam, and thus get a score of .01 or one percent.After going through this training process, the Bayesian software ends up with a list of words and their spammish probabilities (often called a "corpus"). When a new message arrives, the filter looks through the words in it and gives each a score based on those 'training' messages. Then it uses Bayes's formula to come up with a score for the message as a whole. If that's above a certain threshold, the message is tagged as spam and either marked, deleted, or separated.But the real beauty of the Bayesian-filter system comes next, when spam gets through. It's bound to do that, because spammers always try new tricks - they put in long passages of poetry, or try to disguise words with odd misspellings, or come up with other ways to sneak by. When a piece of spam ends up in your Inbox, a Bayesian filter has an extra option: one to mark it as junk. Sometimes it's a button or menu choice, other times you just need to move the message to a Spam folder. It also works the other way: Legit messages may land in the Spam box for various reasons, and they must be re-routed. Either way, the filter now knows what the newest kind of spam looks like.Bayesian filters work because they aren't dependent on things that might change: the way words are spelled, or where a message comes from. All they care about is what you say is spam. At least one filter, POPFile, actually lets you set up categories beyond just 'spam' and 'not spam,' so you can teach it to automatically sort out messages on a particular topic.There are a lot of technical ideas out there for curbing the flow of spam, but I'm willing to bet that none of them will work very well. Stopping spam is up to us, and Reverend Bayes has given us a powerful tool.Andrew Kantor is a technology writer, pundit, and know-it-all who covers technology for the Roanoke Times. He's also a former editor for PC Magazine and Internet World. Read more of his work at kantor.com. His column appears Fridays on USATODAY.com.
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By Kyung M. Song and Jennifer Sullivan, Seattle Times  May 31--With the arrest Wednesday of a Seattle man accused of sending out tens of millions of spam e-mails, federal prosecutors say that computer users across the globe should see a significant drop in spam messages.
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(InfoWorld) - The trouble at Franklin D. Azar & Associates PC began with pornographic spam. Last May the Aurora, Colorado, law firm was being bombarded with offensive messages, and enough of it was seeping through the company's spam filters that employees complained to management, and IT administrator Kevin Rea was told to do something. What happened next, as detailed in federal court filings, shows how the fight against spammers can backfire. Spammers have been using increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade filters, so that over the past few years and despite predictions to the contrary, unsolicited e-mail continues to plague businesses worldwide. On the morning of May 21, Rea dialed up the spam settings on the Barracuda Spam Firewall 200 Azar & Associates was using to block unwanted mail. The changes made it harder for spam to land on the desktops of company employees but they also had one unforeseen consequence: the Barracuda Networks Inc. appliance began blocking e-mail from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising company lawyers of a May 30 hearing in a civil lawsuit. Azar & Associates lawyers blew their court date and this week the judge overseeing the matter ordered the company to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case. Rea did not return a call seeking comment on the matter. What happened to Azar & Associates is unusual, but reflects a legitimate worry for law firms. "This is an IT guy's nightmare if you work in a law firm," said Matt Kesner, chief technology officer with Fenwick & West LLP, a Bay Area law firm with about 250 attorneys. "It doesn't take a very high percentage of false positives in the anti-spam world to misidentify a crucial piece of correspondence." Fenwick & West has missed e-mailed court notices in the past, although it has not blown court dates as a consequence, Kesner said. Over the past 10 years U.S. state and federal courts have increasingly done business electronically in a move to become more efficient and more environmentally friendly. This charge has been led by the federal court system, which uses an electronic document system called Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF), in nearly 200 courts across the country. All federal bankruptcy and district courts use CM/ECF and soon it will be standard in the appellate courts, according to Richard Carelli, a spokesman with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. "You can be notified other ways, but by and large the business of law is carried on electronically, at least in the federal courts," Carelli said. Putting the federal courts, which use the uscourts.gov domain, on a "whitelist" of approved senders is one way to avoid problems receiving e-mail. In fact, the Colorado federal court judge in the Azar & Associates case criticized the law firm for not whitelisting his court's domain name. "It would have been a very simple task to whitelist the... [domain] to insure that such e-mails within this domain would always be received." The judge's order will probably end up costing Azar & Associates several thousand dollars, said Venkat Balasubramani, principal of Balasubramani Law, who has blogged about the issue. But despite the persistence of spammers, Balasubramani doesn't think that the CM/ECF system is really in any trouble. "I don't think the scourge of spam is going to hurt the viability of CM/ECF," he said. "I see this decision as a little bit of an aberration." Kesner, who was a lawyer before taking over the CTO job at Fenwick & West , points out that missed appointments happen when parties are notified by postal mail as well. He avoids whitelists because they must be manually maintained and there is the possibility for human error. But Fenwick & West IT staff uses several mail filtering systems, each considered to have a low frequency of error and they've also programmed their filters to allow more spam than other businesses because of concern over this issue. His advice for legal IT staff? "You test like crazy," he said. "And then you pray and genuflect."
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Spam that includes sexually oriented content viewable in the e-mail message violates the &quot;brown paper wrapper&quot; rules that are part of the CAN-SPAM law, as well as Federal Trade Commission rules.