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]

AVG announced that their Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 is now available for download. This free edition combines an anti-virus and anti-spyware engine to protect users machines against spyware attacks aside from the usual viruses that threaten your computer on a daily basis. The software also provides real-time searching protection with AVG’s LinkScanner technology which was incorporated into the new AVG Security Toolbar.

An English version of the Anti-virus software will be released first, to be followed by other language versions over the next few months. The software can be freely downloaded and used only on single computers which are running on Windows 2000, XP or Vista. 

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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]

It doesn’t look like the participants in the McAfee S.P.A.M. Experiment have received grand jury summonses in their inboxes yet, but it’s something they can look out for. According to the FBI’s press release about the email,

“At first glance, the e-mail appears authentic. It contains a court case number, federal code, name and address of a California federal court, court room number, issuing officers’ names, and the court’s seal. The spammer directs recipients to click the link provided in the e-mail in order to download and print associated information for their records. If the recipient clicks the link, a malicious code is downloaded onto their computer.
The e-mail also contains language threatening recipients with contempt of court charges if they fail to appear. Recipients are told the subpoena will remain in effect until the court grants a release. As with most spam, the content contains multiple spelling errors.”

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Innovative web mail client Woomail has introduced a unique solution to help consumers battle spam brought about by online retail transactions. Called Merchant Key, the service is being provided free for every Woomail account. The Merchant Key service will create a unique email for every online transactions made by consumers. It will allow consumers to delete the Merchant Key instantly right after the online transaction, and sends out alerts to consumers and online merchants whenever the key is reused or shared.

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An anonymous programmer going by the name “John Wane” has claimed to have cracked Yahoo’s CAPTCHA software. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) software is used by most major websites, including Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon, and others, to prevent automated systems from creating thousands of accounts to send spam with. Everyone’s seen it. When you register on a site, you’re presented with an image containing a jumbled “code” and you must enter it correctly to continue.  “John Wane” posted code for a decoder he claimed could get around that step and has an accuracy rate of 35%. 

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Social networking site MySpace (part of Fox Interactive Media, Inc.) has filed a lawsuit against Scott “Spam King” Richter for violating the federal CAN-Spam Act (aka Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) and California’s anti-spam statute.

Allegedly, Richter used phished MySpace account information to send email sales campaigns without the page owner’s knowledge. The filing demands monetary compensation (amount not specified) and a permanent injunction barring Richter and his various companies from MySpace.

If found guilty and there is not an out-of-court settlement, the CAN-Spam Act states that each violation is subject to fines of up to $11,000 and include imprisonment, while the California statute adds $1000 for “each unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement transmitted” with a maximum of $1 million per incident.

Richter has already been sued by Microsoft in 2005/2006 and the New York Attorney General, paying $7 million and $50,000 to NY respectively. Hormel Foods, which owns the questionably tasty SPAM product, stopped Richter’s effort to start up a line of “Spam King” clothing.

With so many cranky companies and the potential to owe many millions more, it’s no wonder Richter likes to settle out of court. Next time, try for a tastier title like “Sausage King” or even “Teenie Weiner King.”

Read [CNNMoney]

I’m a Microsoft guy. Always have been and probably always will be. From the days of BASIC, MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 up until now when I’m developing web applications with .NET and SQL Server. Although I may not agree with how they do business at times, I keep defending them from all the attacks that my friends or co-workers hurl at them. I’ve seen how Microsoft has changed its attitude towards criticism within the last few years. Whereas previously they would just ignore it and act with arrogance, these days Microsoft seems more open to suggestions and are adopting a more customer centric approach to their products.

My affinity for Microsoft products cannot be separated from my respect and admiration for one of its founders and most recognizable face, Bill Gates. Call him what you may, the devil (try Googling “Bill Gates 666”), a thief (people claim he just steals ideas and builds on them, case in point – Mac OS & Windows), arrogant, builder of a monopoly, and much more, but nobody can deny what he’s accomplished. He’s built an empire from scratch, withstood so many blows against Microsoft, provided a great working environment to thousands of loyal Microsofties, and set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he puts quite a fortune into charity work. To me, Bill Gates is a visionary; I believe that without such vision, he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what he has.

And yet, when I see quotes like this from 2004:

Two years from now, spam will be solved.

I cringe and question whether his vision was distorted at the time, or has just been delayed. No disrespect to Mr. Gates at all, but he has been known to throw a vision curveball at the world (remember the now infamous 640K ought to be enough for anybody quote back from 1981?). Of course, in 2004, he was talking in the context of Microsoft’s Caller ID technology (now called the Sender ID Framework), supposed anti-spam technology that would cause a major dent in spammers’ livelihood worldwide.

It’s currently December 11th 2006, and I really doubt this particular vision of Mr. Gates will come to pass. The spam that comes through my mailboxes (Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail) still haven’t shown any signs of slowing down. It looks like this quote will go down in history alongside that 640K quote as ones that will be used against him (and Microsoft undoubtedly) over and over again.

Read [GadgetsOnTheGo]

After being completely wiped out for most of yesterday and today, we’ve finally got Gadgetell back up.  We were unable to login or access our back-end, so we apologize for the lack of stories.  After backing up everything (which took what seems like an eternity), copying back over the files, and deleting the 7,000 comment spams we got yesterday, we’re back to blogging.  I think it’s safe to assume that caused quite a bit of strain on our servers.  Now that we back up, you have no excuse not to enter our Docupen giveaway!  We’ll write some stories, and you go do that.  Head over to the post to find out how!