Stab First, Smathers

August 18, 2005

In an update to yesterday’s blog posting regarding AOL’s “eh, whatever”-type news, here is some regarding-AOL news of�which is worth writing home about --

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Former America Online employee Jason Smathers yesterday was sentenced to 15 months in prison for stealing 92 million e-mail screen names from the company and then selling them to a spammer.�He pleaded guilty in February in a Manhattan federal court to charges including conspiracy and interstate trafficking of stolen property.

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Smathers was paid $28,000 by an Internet marketer for the names, which were taken from AOL’s database of 30 million subscribers at the time. He cooperated with prosecutors and appeared mournful in court on Wednesday, where he faced up to 24 months in prison under federal guidelines.

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Although imprisonment and spamming, I think, should be fungible, Smathers received a lighter sentence than other spammers have received of late. Last year, a New York man known as the “Buffalo Spammer” — he was spamming from the city of Buffalo; he wasn’t a buffalo himself, nor was he spamming the e-mail on computers of ever-evolving gregarious herbivore�buffalo who now take advantage of the Internet infrastructures located throughout the West African forest — was sentenced to 3-1/2 to 7 years in prison for violating state forgery and identity-theft laws. I won’t even go into the fact that an occupational spammer was recently murdered.

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Smathers, according to AP, told U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, “I know I have done something very wrong,” blah, blah, blah...yes, yes you did. More spammers are now in direct relation with identity theft, and Smathers put all AOL subscribers — of which there are many millions — in jeopardy of becoming identity-theft victims. People use e-mail as a simple but primary cast of communication, and his self-involved actions could have put many e-mail users in the position to not only receive annoying spam e-mail, but also in the position to be more vulnerable to identity theft, viruses, etc., etc., everything that comes as a potential consequence of spam.

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Also, his employer lost both integrity and money. Prosecutors said AOL suffered an estimated loss of $300,000 from employee time spent dealing with the issue, as well as hardware and software expenses. Hellerstein said that while AOL's loss estimate was hard to prove, the offense was still serious.

Smathers pleaded for leniency in a letter to the judge. He described himself as “an outlaw” in the “new frontier” of cyberspace — as if the Internet is lawless and as if he is the victim of his environment. My suggestion, Smathers: stab someone first or become some big brute’s girlfriend.

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Speaking of Buffalo —

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For this blog’s grammar-interested readers, the following string of words is actually a syntactically and otherwise grammatically correct sentence: Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

(One presumes prepositions.)

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Because of parsing and the many definitions, or homographs, and universal assumptions of the word “buffalo,” this sentence, if written in its long form, would say: The buffalo (animal) buffaloed (intimidated) by buffalo (animals) from Buffalo (NY city) themselves buffalo (intimidate) the buffalo (animal) of Buffalo (city).�

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Essentially, this is only using three of buffalo’s (the word) meanings; it can actually have other usages (including a company name and a type of fish).

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DRB