On Friday 27 October 2006 07:51, Chris Walters wrote: > Unfortunately, I think the only answer to spam is a class action lawsuit > - or an International one against the people who are getting rich off > these messages. I'll bet that most legitimate Internet Service/Access > Providers would join as plaintiffs, since this massive amount of spam > wastes their bandwidth and costs them money (spam filters, bandwidth > that could be used for legitimate purposes, etc.). If you hit the top > spammers in the pocketbook - hard, it *may* slow down, and if you hit > them hard enough to drive them out of business, it will stop. I don't > know if this has been tried before, but I seem to recall single ISPs > suing spammers and winning.
There is a loophole in the above argument. Some of the ISPs charge by the amount of traffic an individual user uses. If a spammer uses a zombie operation and starts sending spam from these zombie machines, it increases the net amount of bandwidth the user uses, resulting in higher internet bills, and hence more income for the ISP. So shutting down the zombie computers will infact result in reduction of revenues for ISPs. On a related note, according to http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=hoshame#domsum , there are many popular ISPs (verizon.net, rr.com etc) in US which dont care a single thing about spam emanating from their networks. Often times, I feel that the ISPs have to be sued instead of the spammers themselves... raju raju -- Kamaraju S Kusumanchi http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/kk288/ http://malayamaarutham.blogspot.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
