Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

According to a report on Information Week, infamous “Spam King” Sanford Wallace, and his phishing partner Walter Rines were slammed with a whopping $225 million judgment by a U.S. District Court on Monday.

“MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer of MySpace, in an e-mailed statement. “The Federal District Court in Los Angeles awarded MySpace $223,777,500 under the federal CAN-SPAM Act and $1,500,000 under the California anti-phishing statute. User engagement is up 32 percent year over year while spam is significantly decreasing, proving efforts like this are working.”

In October of 2006 the pair began creating bogus MySpace accounts and hijacking over 300,000 others. They then used the compromised accounts to send tens of thousands of spam messages and bomb the comment section of thousands of MySpace pages with links to other spam sites. The popular social networking site sued in 2007. Wallace posted a response to the judgement on his website, claiming he had never been served and that “the check is in the mail.”

Since 1997 Wallace has been sued by many service providers including AOL, Earthlink, and CompuServe, and last year was fined $4 million by the FTC for deceptive advertising and distributing spyware.

Read [InformationWeek]

Following cocaine overdose deaths of two college students in February and May, authorities have arrested scores of San Diego State University students in a drug bust that caught fraternity members openly dealing drugs. The bust, dubbed Operation Sudden Fall, yielded two kilograms of cocaine, 350 Ecstasy pills, hash oil, marijuana, methamphetamine, illicit prescription drugs, psychedelic mushrooms, several guns and at least $60,000 in cash.

Seventy five out of the 90 people arrested were students.  Among them was an undergraduate about to receive a criminal justice degree and another who was gunning for a master’s degree in homeland security. Ralph Partridge, a DEA special agent in San Diego, quipped:

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It is like silky chocolate that is dipped in creamy peanut butter; that’s how I’d describe two companies I use and enjoy teaming up to bring their services together.  PhoneTag (formerly Simulscribe) the voicemail to text service that saves me from listening to voicemails and Grand Central, the service that allows me to filter out who can actually reach me, have cut a deal to allow the services to work hand in hand.  A happy day indeed.

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If a torch climbs a mountain and no one is there to live blog it, or webcam it, or email home about it; did it really happen?  China Mobile insures all these things are possible thanks to their business office and internet cafe at 17,000 feet above sea level at the base of Mount Qomolangma.  Oddly or fantastically (your choice), users can pay bills, SIM change services and watch free films, in addition to other “new business experiences.” Because after a good climb to base camp, I usually get a hankering for a SIM change and review of my monthly texting charges.

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Just a few days ago, our Robert Nelson posted on the availability of free Wi-Fi at Starbucks and Barnes & Nobles, which at the time seemed to be a legit and intentional offer. Now, it seems the service was premature as its been yanked back into the ether. Rats.

It seems in places where the service worked, it no longer does. Sadly, even after a quick trip to our local Starbucks, we were greeted (as seen in the screenshot) with paid Wi-Fi only. According to MacRumors, AT&T refused to comment on the snafu. I am sure we can expect an announcement shortly, perhaps even in time for a big Apple announcement in June. You know, if Apple is inclined to make one.

Via [MacRumors]

MySpace has won its lawsuit against infamous spammer Sanford Wallace, dubbed the “Spam King”. MySpace was awarded a legal judgment after Wallace ignored numerous requests to turn over documents and ultimately failed to show up in court. The suit was filed last year, accusing Wallace of running a phishing scam to access MySpace profiles and then using them to spam thousands of other users in an effort to get them to visit his website. Wallace claimed that since he was not accepting mail or packages, he had missed all the notifications of his court dates. The court didn’t buy it.

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A Sprint employee, Daryl J. Roy, working in Dayton, Ohio, recently took a liking to a female customer, Nicole McElveen, to which he has sold a phone. He began by sending text messages, but later he started sending picture messages. It began with simple text messages mentioning her appearance, and then requests to have dinner. Later he took it even further and started sending pictures, which began with his face and eventually turned into pics of his whole body, and naked pics at that. Also, an interesting thing is that she didn’t even have a plan that included picture messaging, so she would have gotten billed for those unwanted and very creepy messages, as a salesman you would have thought he would have taken that into consideration, of course being as creepy as he sounds he most likely would not have cared anyway.

Nicole McElveen said that she wasn’t interested in any of his advances, and they were uncalled for. Roy was clearly going against Sprint policy by using her cell phone number in this way, so when all is said and done, this will put himself and could also put Sprint in hot water. In court, McElveen is attempting to sue both Roy and Sprint for over a million dollars, due to sever emotional stress, loss of sleep, nervousness as well as hospital and medical expenses.

While a million seems like a lot, I certainly hope she wins the case because it wasn’t fair for Roy to do something like this to her, and maybe the next creep that thinks something like this is a good idea will have second thoughts.

Read [Dayton Daily News] Via [Switched]

Helio has just become the first cellular provider to offer Gmail as a push service. Sure other carriers can take advantage of either POP or IMAP access, but push is so much nicer, because what is better than instant gratification. Helio users with an Ocean, Mysto or Fin will now have access to the “ultimate inbox.”

Setting up push support for Gmail is about as simple as it can be, assuming you already have your Gmail account set-up, then all you have to do is go to the Menu and hit the “Send/Receive” button and it will ask you whether or not you want push support activated.

In addition to the push support for Gmail, Helio also supports push for Helio Mail, Yahoo, Windows Live, and AOL. If email is a high-priority and you are not into the BlackBerry then Helio may be worth checking out.

Via [HelioCity]

SimulScribe offers a great service, one that is a benefit to anyone who dislikes checking and responding to voicemail. They convert your voicemail message to text and then deliver it to you as either an email or text message, to which you can then respond to the “voicemail” by return message. This is a wonderful option to have, especially when you need to check and respond to messages but are in a setting where using and speaking on a phone would be considered rude. It also helps to save time, because you can simply read the important parts of the message and get the details you need without having to listen to whoever is leaving the message ramble on and on.

While all this sounds great, and there service works wonderful their name has been holding them back. The name SimulScribe was born from “Simultaneous Voicemail Transcription,” and while its a catchy name, it turns out that a name with missing letters is not always a good way to get customers to be able to find you easily. 

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Popular social networking site Reunion.com’s latest marketing technique has come under fire. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the site dupes people into joining by sending an email pretending to be from someone they know who’s been looking for them, and banks on the recipients curiosity being enough to get them to click on the link and join the site. Once the person signs up, their address book is scraped and the site spams those addresses with the same type of email. The site doesn’t let a member choose who the email is sent to-it simply sends it to every contact they have. Needless to say this has caused embarrassment for many. One victim had over 250 of her contacts receive such emails after she signed up. If you receive an email from Reunion.com from someone you know who says they were looking for you on the site, don’t believe it, delete it!

Read [Los Angeles Times]