Help The Feds Decide How Long Spammers Should Spend In Jail

from the now,-stop-drooling dept

It seems like a dangerous thing to do to ask for public input on how long spammers should go to jail for. It seems, these days, if you ask the average person, they might not have any real problem with a life sentence for some of the worst spammers (while also forcing them to sit at a computer hitting the damn delete key over and over again). Still, the folks who put together sentencing guidelines for federal crimes need to figure out exactly what deceptive spamming techniques deserve what kind of prison sentence, and they're asking the public for help.
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  1. identicon
    alternatives, 18 Jan 2004 @ 10:19pm

    Alas, won't be enough.

    Look at the time the Enron execs are going to spend in jail VS the economic damage done by them.

    The Spammer's damage is debatable, as the spammers claim already they "do not damage" while the anti-spam list the damage in the billion's of US Dollars.

    The lack of firm numbers will keep the fines low and the jail time minimal.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    drb, 19 Jan 2004 @ 8:48am

    No Subject Given

    There's the seed of a good idea there - the sentence duration should set by the volume of spam - the convicted spammer gets a hotmail account initialized with as many incoming messages as they have been shown to have sent. The "delete all" option is disabled, so deletions have to be one at a time. They're released when the inbox is empty. (And their address is widely posted so they get their share of new stuff from their as-yet-uncaught co-spammers.)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    thecaptain, 19 Jan 2004 @ 5:04pm

    No Subject Given

    I didn't see castration, boiling oil or execution in the list...ah well.

    Maybe having them manually filter spam all day every day of their prison sentence would be a good thing...no filters, nothing...let them hunt through 2000+ messages daily hunting for their prison correspondence (and notification of release and parole hearings) and THEN let them tell me that I can "just hit delete"

    link to this | view in thread ]


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