At 01:47 PM 5/11/2003 -0400, you wrote:
Take a look at this SlashDot story:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/05/11/1648253.shtml?tid=126&tid=111
which refers to this Oregonian article:
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/business/105256787116000.xml
While reading the article you posted, my attention focused in on the open
relays / open ports that he was using. And while I have known for a long
time that this was a method used by spammers, I hit upon an idea.
If the spammer is using the open ports / relays without the knowledge or
permission of the owner of the system and had the sysadmin of the system
being abused known they would have stopped the use of their system for
spamming, then it opens an interesting legal approach.
The spammer should in this case be able to be prosecuted under the
anti-hacking statutes. And with the Patriot Act the consequences of
"hacking" are very severe (though they were already.).
I called my State Attorney General's office and they seemed to agree
that this would be an interesting approach and would be well worth
following up with to see if it could be proved out. I'll probably make a
few more phone calls to see if it is pursuable or not.
In either case, it is probably beyond the scope of this mailing list
but if a few spammers ended up in prison for using open relays and
mail ports, I wouldn't complain too much and it might go a ways
towards curtailing the abuse of other people's resources for sending
the spam at least.
-Art
--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg