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Non-Tech : Auric Goldfinger's Short List -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockDung who wrote (11493)	4/8/2003 10:56:14 PM
From: rrufff	Respond to of 19428

Here's another guy outing spammers and telemarketers Motley Fool Spam Fighter Wins Big Tuesday April 8, 1:14 pm ET By Rex Moore Francis Uy deserves our thanks. The tech specialist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland has been waging war against spammers, and with a court victory yesterday, it appears he's gaining the upper hand. ADVERTISEMENT Uy (pronounced Wee) operates a website that posts the addresses and phone numbers of known spammers. It's been an effective tactic; outing the violators allows ISPs or website operators to block their emails, for example. It has also motivated individuals to give the reviled spammers a taste of their own medicine by flooding them with email and phone calls. None of this has been encouraged by Uy, but it's what landed him in court yesterday. George Allen Moore, Jr., an alleged spammer and owner of Maryland Internet Marketing Inc., sued Uy for harassment. Yes, the man known as "DrFatburn," who has flooded many an inbox with ads for Fat-N-Emy and Extreme Colon Cleanser, and who cares not one whit about the quality of life of others, has the stony gall to claim he is being harassed. As The Washington Post reports today, a Maryland district court judge disagreed, and allowed Uy to keep his website up and running. Here's a message for Moore, in language he can understand: drfatburn! For a limited time only!@ NOW U KNOW HOW IT FEELS!!! Why should we care about such victories? Aside from how it degrades our quality of life, spam also substantially increases the costs of Web-related businesses. Those costs are then passed on to us, the consumers. (A quick timeout: Many businesses, including The Motley Fool, send out emails. Legitimate businesses have easy ways to opt out of these mailings, however, and you'll likely never hear from them again.) Any business associated with the Internet -- whether giants like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - News), America Online (NYSE: AOL - News), and EarthLink (Nasdaq: ELNK - News), or small, mom-and-pop outfits -- see their margins eroded and profits reduced because of spam. Uy had a message for Moore after the court decision, according to the Post. "Every time you try to mess with me, I will post it on the 'Net, and more people will learn about you," he wrote. "I don't encourage harassment against you, and I don't need to. The facts speak quite loudly enough. Your best option is to crawl back under a rock and suck it up, or move to some state other than the one I live in." biz.yahoo.com