mass overreaction to what looks much like a stock email.
I was with him that it was a bit silly till he decided to call them "retards" and to "piss off" right off the bat. He comes across as a bit of an idiot really.
Yeah, he does come off as an ass, but I don't think this is an overreaction. On most ISPs such an action gets a user booted permanently with no recourse for dispute. With great power comes great responsibility, and PayPal has shown no responsibility here.
Legal letters as a rule should never be sent by a crawler. If it is, I'm sure PayPal is doing something illegal. If it isn't, then someone at PayPal seriously fucked up and didn't do their job.
He's entirely justified there. That stock email could have cost him a lot of money and hassle if his ISP had been a little less clueful. Sending it was grossly irresponsible.
Sending legal threats like this, whose validity depends entirely on the context, with no idea of the context, is grossly irresponsible.
He did not sink to their level. If he sent them and their ISP baseless legal threats that might result in a temporary loss of internet access, that would be sinking to their level. If he tried to trick their domain registrar into transferring their domain to him, that would be sinking to their level. If he tracked down the families of the legal staff and threatened them in their homes, that would be sinking to their level. All he did was write some bad words in his blog.
We can't always keep our cool and merely explain factually what is wrong. We get angry and indignated and need to vent that. I don't think it's wrong to show that, as long as you also make the point using the proper arguments.
Imagine the scenario where somebody hotlinks that image, though. That's my only problem with it. If it were viewable only from his blog, that would be more fair use than what he has going on instead. A slight change in context and suddenly he's potentially enabling more phishing. Otherwise, I agree with him almost completely (minus the attitude)
its not like image uploaders are rare though, why would the scammers bother with hotlinking his image when they could just upload the file to one of the million of image uploaders out there.
I wonder why it is seen as acceptable to send out automated mails containing the legal equivalent of what I would call 'cartoony threats' - "I'm going to sue you for a billion dollars!" especially when they lack solid evidence of what is actually going on.
I'm not saying it should be illegal, but it does seem, at the very least, quite rude.
Publicly pointing out 'hey, company X was really rude, and it turns out that they weren't paying attention when they sent the mail' as this article does, is probably a good first step towards convincing companies to be a bit more careful before throwing around threats.
heh. yeah. I can't tell you how many bogus abuse complaints I get. The other day, I got a spam complaint; the 'spam' contained within was an abuse report sent by one of my customers.
Another time I showed someone on a mailing list how to look up the owners of IPv6 addresses. he included that with his abuse report to the owner, and the owner of the IP block (who happened to be an upstream of an upstream of mine) forwarded the message back to me, as if I was somehow involved.
In both these cases, I responded to all involved. in both these cases, I didn't hear anything back from anyone.
I can only imagine that most abuse desks are either understaffed or poorly automated. The thing is, handling abuse is important, but it's not easy. It's not easy to send a good abuse report, and it's not easy to parse it, to weigh the rights of all involved, and to do the right thing on the other end. An abuse desk person needs to be part lawyer and part network admin. Add to that the fact that most ISPs put the least effort they can into abuse, without getting put on blacklists, and you have a job that is usually done poorly.
Agreed. Point being, we oftentimes overlook the very powerful ability to de-escalate a conflict by refusing to respond in kind.
I think part of this stems from the way people often picture the response of the other party in their minds when they formulate a piece of communication. If that response is level-headed and downright nice when they expect it to be rude, you can completely unman them diffuse the situation. Just the fact that the response is very different from what was expected is often enough to cause the other party to reevaluate their position. "(Hold on, this reply is not what I expected, my understanding of the situation could be flawed, must reevaluate.")
The crazy thing is, the substance of your reply can be absolutely the same, but if you phrase it humbly and nicely you can often obtain a much better result. Call it social hacking :)
I was with him that it was a bit silly till he decided to call them "retards" and to "piss off" right off the bat. He comes across as a bit of an idiot really.