May 31, 2007

Soloway locked away, Microsoft says "hooray"

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Every time I see a spam message in my inbox or read about spam, I wonder, "who are these people who buy this stuff?" Somebody must be buying it, or spammers would give up and do something else. This news report from Yahoo shows that spam does pay, at least until they catch you.

Evidently, Robert Alan Soloway was indicted with 35 counts of various frauds and thefts, and is being sued for $773,000 having already survived at least $17 million in civil judgements. That's a lot of male enhancement products, fake rolexes and pirated software.

As if being indicted, sued and generally reviled wasn't enough, Soloway has to suffer being gloated over by Microsoft attorneys. You know you've sunk low when Microsoft's lawyers say you're a bad person.

"He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world," said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. "He's a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day."

And I suppose I have to agree with those lawyers for once. Will this lower the mercury in the spamometer? Sadly, I doubt it will make much of a dent in the long run of junk email.

Speaking of email, I've just discovered an interesting blog about "...the challenges and risks of managing corporate email and IM." The bit about "email bankruptcy" is especailly interesting.

Posted by David Karp | Comments (3)
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May 07, 2007

Macro Hoo-Ha about Yahoo and Microsoft

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PC Magazine, among others, weighs in on the increasing buzz around a possible merger of Yahoo with Microsoft. Of course, the real reason this is getting such coverage is that the combined entity might be a real threat to the dominance of Google in paid search and online advertising. Other than that, Microsoft using their enormous cash reserves (which they can't figure out how to spend) to buy their way into a market they covet is not that noteworthy. The chart shows the change in stock prices Friday when the rumors broke out widely. It'll be interesting to see where this goes today.

Posted by David Karp | Comments (2)
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