How Do You Punish a 16-year-old Spammer?

An anonymous reader writes "A 16 year old 'Boy Spammer', David Lennon, has been told by a judge that as punishment for his crimes he can't leave his bedroom for two months during curfew. CNET thinks this is no punishment at all: "With the streets awash with axe murderers, terrorists and paedophiles, staying in and playing games seems like a reasonable response. Given that our kids are growing up as stay-in gamers, the Boy Spammer's curfew is no more punishment for the blighter than sentencing a boy caught speeding to two months on a race track." Apparently Lennon used a piece of email bombing software called Avalanche to wreak revenge on his ex-employer, Domestic and General Group. His five million emails contained the message "You will die in seven days.""

*snort*

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Alternative punishment from TFA:

Lennon should be forced to use an iPod Shuffle filled with fantastic music that he is completely unable to identify on account of the absence of a display.He will then have to deal with the paradoxical conditions of being utterly cool (having an iPod-branded player) and being utterly ignorant (having no idea what is playing). He will, in short, learn what it is like to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Diabolical!

Why spam works

[suso]

See, this spam worked because about 200 of the people received it did die in 7 days. Its always that small percentage of people responding to the spam that keeps the spammers going. Damn those people.

[moderators: this is supposed to be funny]

Heres what I would do....

[ConsumerOfMany]

Make him write out each email he sent on a blackboard, all 5 million of them.

easy punishment

[legoburner]

- Make him consume everything he was selling/trying to sell
- Forced community service fixing virus-laden windows boxes
- Public flogging
- Format every disk/hard drive/CD he owns
- Break his fingers

And that's just off the top of my head. How easy is that?

Re:*snort*

[portmapper]

> He will, in short, learn what it is like to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Oh my God! The next Governor of California will be a 16 year old spammer?

the key word is Punishment

[roman_mir]

If you actually want to PUNISH the kid, not to 'rehabilatate' him, then do something evil and disgusting. Like get all those people, who received his emails into a building, bring in the kid and then let every single person in that building to spend some time with him one on one with no rules at all. They could do anything they wanted without any consequences. That'll be a punishment.

If you want to rehabilitate him, this one I don't know much about, I only know how to do evil and disgusting stuff.
--

ideal punishement

[way2trivial]

spam filter.. human...

Re:Heres what I would do....

[ackthpt]

Make him write out each email he sent on a blackboard, all 5 million of them.

Like this?

Dear Sir/Madam, I am very sorry for sending you an unwelcomed message stating that you will die in seven days. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send $1 to: Sorry Guy, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield

Re:Why spam works

[WilliamSChips]

So the solution to spam is to get people to not die in seven days?

Re:Community service

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

can only use a computer in the presence of an adult until he demonstrates he can act like an adult

Maybe they only need to restrict him to the use of just one computer [wikipedia.org].

A worst punishment...

[__aaclcg7560]

Working at McDonald's.

Let the punishment fit the crime....

[Anonymous Coward]

... kill him in seven days.

No Community service - Yes excruciating Pain

[lbmouse]

How do you punish a 16-year-old Spammer? Community service is too good for him and doesn't send a strong enough message to other pubescent male teens thinking of starting Spam businesses... I say string 'em up by his testicles!

Re:Community service

[TheWoozle]

Haven't you been paying attention to the news?! Any literary allusions to Uncle Remus stories are racist! You insensitive clod.

What a tar baby you've just picked up.

Re:*snort*

[FatMacDaddy]

The worst part is we'd probably be better off with a 16 year old spammer than we are with Ahnold.

Re:Band and Dangerous Journalism

[TheRaven64]

Media companies are meant to inform on the truth

They did. It was successfully apprehended a while back.

Re:What?

[compsci07]

They should give him free subscriptions to the top ten MMOG's but only allow him a dialup internet connection.

Re:*snort*

[__aaclcg7560]

We seen this before. Ahnold goes back into the past to kill the mother to eliminate the competition. It's a vicious cycle that never ends.

Re:Why spam works

[diersing]

With 80% of today's traffic being spam, a better punishment might have been a requirement to have only one email account not use any spam filtering for the term of 10 years. I'm thinking an AOL account with Outlook Express might be in order just to rub it in.

Wanna really punish a teenage geek?

[Anonymous Coward]

Make him sign up for sports. The ones you play outside with other people. Preferably contact sports.

Force him to attempt to ask out a cheerleader. Repeat until one says "yes" or he turns 30, whichever comes first.

Give him a makeover.

Yeah, yeah, 8th amendment* and all that...

* http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constituti on.billofrights.html#amendmentviii [cornell.edu]

Re:No Community service - Yes excruciating Pain

[TheGreek]

Send him to Singapore and have him canned

Does being canned hurt more than being caned? It sounds as though it might.

Write them out

[Bender0x7D1]

Make him hand-write one copy of the email for each email that got sent.

If you want to be mean, make him write out the headers as well.

How Do You Punish An 18-Year Old Spammer?

[Petersko]

Simple. Do the opposite of locking him in his room.

Make him attend a minimum of three raging parties per week, each one primarily populated by jocks and hotties.

If he's 18 and spamming people, he does not have the social skills necessary to do well in such an environment. He'll cry for the warmth and security of his home, but he should be forced to stay until the last jock has wedgie'd him.

Re:*snort*

[Anonymous Coward]

Half a line of lyrics in google is sufficient to find the track name and artist.

Absolutely. It's much easier to carry around a full notebook to google for tracks, then to look on a display.

That's why I use a shuffle too!

Re:*snort*

[gronne]

I was gonna say he should be dropped on an island with only an iPod filled with Barry Manilow songs.

Re:Maybe this was just me..

[Anonymous Coward]

He's 16. Hmmm, you'll have to tie boxing gloves to his hands.

How do you punish a 16-year old spammer?

[nightsweat]

Tape his hands together and hide all the lotion and kleenex.

Re:No Community service - Yes excruciating Pain

[mrscott]

From what I've read, being canned is much, much worse than caning. Whereas a caning, while painful, does not generally result in death, there are two ways to be canned and both are fatal: (1) Method one is very similar to stoning in which the subject her buried up to a certain point, but their head remains exposed. An angry mob then lobs cans of food--usually Campbell's Creamy Tomato (TM)--at the subject. Often times, members of said angry mob mutilate the can in such as way as to preserve the contents, but sharpen the edges. (2) The subject is sliced and diced alive and the results fed into cans on an assembly line. The cans them come off the assembly line and a label is attached--usually "Campbell's Creamy Tomato (TM)" and the "product" then sent to a supermarket in a box with the words "Brought to you by {subject's name}. He/she put her heart and soul (and liver) into bringing you the best possible soup."

Re:Why spam works

[bhsurfer]

Damn that crafty bastard! He just *proved* that he's smarter than most other folks with his excellent manipulation of the media! There should be some sort of a prize for that as well.

Chris Rock knows how to deal with this situation

[Raul654]

"We don't need the death penalty. We've got the tossed salad man. Shit, if I had a choice right now between the electric chair and tossing a salad - I'd be like, 'so where do you plug it in? shouldn't I be wet?'

Everyone's talking about public education. Kids are outta control. We need tougher rules. We need prayer in schools. We don't need that shit. We just need the tossed salad man. He'd straighten those kids out. Hey, Jimmy. You got a D. You know what that means. NOOOO! NOOOO! I don't wanna toss a salad! I don't wanna toss a salad! I'm gonna read! I'm gonna learn to read" -- Chris Rock

His computer?

[bingo_cannon]

I bet his computer is in his bedroom! Now the judge gets the spam!

Is that even a question?

[Iron Condor]

I'm kinda baffled by this: you don't punish a 16-year-old, you punish the people responsible for the actions of the 16-year-old and that means the parents, whos mandate clearly includes a minimum of oversight over their offspring at least to the degree of ensuring that they don't harm those around them.

If we actually held parents responsible for the actions of their children, maybe more parents would start taking the whole "parenting" thing seriously and these kinds of problems could be avoided in the first place.

Re:Reference to The Ring?

[XnavxeMiyyep]

Really? Wow! You have discovered something incredible no one else has ever noticed before! What other great abilities do you have!?

Re:What?

[Wyzardking]

Sounds like we had similar rooms; I had a 13" b/w tv, a stereo (complete with 8 track recorder), two computers (TI994A and CoCo) and the obligatory Atari, and of course all my books, so I tended to stay in my room most of the time. My dad once told me to go to my room then he said,

"Wait! That's no punishment. Go to MY room!"

Man, that was two boring hours.... :)

Re:Why spam works

[loimprevisto]

Damn that crafty bastard! He just *proved* that he's smarter than most other folks with his excellent manipulation of the media! There should be some sort of a prize for that as well.

It's called an elected office

Re:Why spam works

[delinear]

Okay, so if we kill them all within six days, the spammers lose. Grab an axe. It's your civic duty.

Re:You have the thanks

[Skynyrd]

You're essentially repeating the talking points that Enron paid for to divert people from the fact that Arnold was planning not to try to recover any of the money from the Enron scam that ripped California utility customers off for billions of dollars using staged power shutdowns to scare people into paying any amount of money the power companies demanded.

Thanks for moving to Oregon, the average IQ in California went up when you crossed the state line.

Do us a favor. Don't come back.

Go fuck yourself retard.

As I said, he's not perfect, but he understands that Californina needs businesses to survive in order for the state to survive.
Davis was sitting on his fund raising thumb too much to actually do anything to Enron.

We got fucked. By Davis. By Enron. By everybody who had a hand in it.

Sure Arnold should have gone after Enron, and he doesn't have the balls to do it. Just like everybody else. Were we better off with Davis? No way. Are we better off with Arnold? A little. He's still a politician, and he'll continue to cater to the almighty dollar, but he at least has a tiny clue. That tiny clue was way bigger than the one Davis had.

I may have raised the IQ of California when I left, but I also took $100,000 a year business with me. And a house. And a $600 a year vehicle registration. And another car, and two motorcycles, and plenty of sales tax, income tax, and property tax revenue. I left behind an employee who's now on unemployment. California is so much better off chasing out legitimate businesses and leaving the ignorant, unemployed, uninsured, non-licensed people to suck even more welfare, food stamps, and your taxes out of the people. Good going!

Next time you need your house needs some work, make sure you go to Home Depot and hire a guy with no license or insurance.

Cheers!