Quote from: iCEBREAKER on June 20, 2011, 08:01:38 PM

Quote from: Horkabork on June 20, 2011, 08:39:11 AM

Quote from: pancakes on June 20, 2011, 06:15:04 AM

It doesn't seem that bad. He mentions exchanges other than Tradehill and you don't HAVE to click his link. Actually I think it could be quite informative to traders who don't follow the forums or know of any other exchanges.

So sending 60,000 emails using a stolen database is okay, because we didn't HAVE to click the link in it? That's insane, even coming from a guy named "pancakes". Just because I hate you now, I'm eating your namesake for breakfast tomorrow. I hope their fluffy, syrupy demise transmits some telepathic pain to you. Man, I'm telling you, I can eat a lot of pancakes, so prepare for my wrath.

By the way, guy-who-did-this-if-you-are-reading-this, that counts as a felony if you happened to send emails to people in certain states, like Virginia. Hopefully tradehill has some good records of you.

It's not a felony, or spam. So you can stop crying and shedding greasy burger tears everywhere.

The situation is exactly the same as when Hint.io emailed the compromised Gawker users to inform them that their accounts were hacked.

I'll even google that for you http://lmgtfy.com/?q=gawker+hint.io so (hopefully) all of you drama queens can stop being so huffy and butt-hurt.

Get the picture? No? Well here it is anyway.

Quote

This morning I got an email from hint.io telling me that my Gawker account had been compromised. I very nearly ignored it as phishing. From the screenshot at the top of this post, you can probably see why. All three of the links in it, including the one to the Forbes article, link to the hint.io domain, which I'd never heard of. Googling the domain name mostly resulted in other people on message boards discussing it. The site itself has only a vague description of what it is and says that it's in beta.

But it is in fact, a legitimate email, for certain definitions of legitimate.

A legitimate email that should have come from Gawker. They have finally posted a brief apology and a FAQ, neither of which mention hint.io (presumably because they have nothing to do with each other). And as far as I can tell, Gawker still hasn't sent out emails to the compromised accounts themselves, although the FAQ suggests that they're "in the process of notifying those users."

So what of hint.io, then? It appears to be the tool for a group that took matters into their own hands after Gawker opted to leave its users in the dark. TNW (The Next Web) calls them "good Samaritans." But at least one commenter there thinks that those sending the emails are as bad as those who compromised the accounts to begin with, since they're using the compromised data to sent the alerts.

As one of the recipients, I disagree. I'm thankful for their transparency where Gawker was unwilling. The data has been released. That can't be changed. But they've used it for good, not evil. Or at least as an effort to help prevent more evil.

http://opensource.com/life/10/12/what-hintio-and-why-are-they-emailing-you

Now, tell us all how much success you had suing Hint.io for spamming Gawker users.

Oh that's right you can't because your opinion is simply flat dead wrong!

But something tells me that you'll keep clinging onto it, rather than admit you don't know understand the objective definition of spam, as opposed to your subjective, emotional 'I knows spam when I sees it' herpiddy-derp.

That's not the same at all and you know it. If you don't know it, then you're probably just a sentient bottle of hand lotion or something, in which case I guess I can forgive you for not understanding ideas like this. The people who notified gawker users, while it was unsolicited mass email, was neither advertising nor misleading. The referral spam sent to Mt. Gox users was misleading, unsolicited, an advertisement, and above all, unnecessary as Mt. Gox already informed everyone with an earlier email. The gawker email you mentioned might escape the CAN-SPAM act and similar, stricter state laws because it wasn't advertising or soliciting. And they identified themselves. However even it was, strictly speaking, spam because they obtained the email addresses from the hacked database. If I sent a one-sentence email, saying nothing but "Icebreaker is a sentient bottle of hand lotion" to everyone using this database, that would be committing a crime unless I could demonstrate that I had obtained each and every email from a legitimate source.

The Mt. Gox spam also contained deliberately deceptive statements, such as that the community was moving to tradehill, thus implying that Mt. Gox had permitted the email or endorsed tradehill. It was also unsigned, anonymous, and sent likely using modified headers, an open relay, or other such methods meant to disguise the origin of the email. In Virginia and other places, that's not just "CAN-SPAM noncompliant" but actually criminal (see the Virginia Computer Crimes Act).

The unsolicited Gawker email, unless someone were to prove criminal conspiracy in their use of the hacked database, probably qualifies as free speech. But free speech does not apply when the main purpose of the email is to advertise a commercial product or service, which is obviously what the Tradehill spammer was doing.