May 04, 2004

Wil Wheaton puts his money where his mouth is - offering $1000 to combat comment spam in an attempt to catch the sick b@$tards that flooded his site with kiddie porn links... on a post regarding how sick Wil's cat Felix is.

I'm passing this on, because I hope Wil catches the jerks, and the more people who know about the offer, the more likely someone is to come forward with info. The important info is this:

I am offering $1000 for information that leads to the arrest and successful prosecution of anyone involved in the crapflooding of this website.
posted by sarah 20 years ago
  • This is all very nice, but I suspect his money is safe. Quite apart from anything else, what have they done that he can prosecute them for? Posting comments, however offensive, to a publicly accessible system isn't (as far as I know) illegal, and I'm not sure a Denial Of Service argument would stick. What else is there? Why not offer the $1000 to an open-source programmer as commission for software to stop future crapfloods, not just for himself, but for everyone.
  • are you kidding? there are *plenty* of vague "cybercrime" laws...
  • Well, if he can find the ones that posted the kiddie porn, that would be a relatively easy one to get an arrest and prosecution for. Also if you're committing some sort of fraud with the post, such as by trying to sell something and misrepresenting yourself while doing so. Oh, and posting DeCSS code or the like. Otherwise, I agree, it will be tricky.
  • i'm more worried about felix the kitty.
  • I find it interesting that he takes it personally. I didn't see the comments, but my site gets flooded with porn comments all the time and I never get the impression it's a personal attack. That said, I really hope there's a viable way to start catching these jerks, but I'm skeptical that there is. You'd think the only way to do it is via the ISPs, but they don't seem very willing to actually stop the people who are sending out huge mass emails or using scripts to spam comments. And also, I can't read about a dying kitty. It makes me too sad.
  • I've never taken comment-spam personally either, but I've never had child porn spam, not even via email as far as I've noticed. I think if I thought I could actually make a difference, I might try to stop someone from spreading crap like that any further. The problem is, like Kimberly said, that it's really difficult to have any impact on spamming/spammers. I wonder if he'd give the thousand dollars to the spammer if they promised not to do it again.
  • ISP's are generally understaffed to handle any kind of cops-and-robbers escapade with virtual criminals. The bottom line is that the only way to handle "corporate security" is to automate most of it, to filter out the bad stuff.
  • Tracy: as Douglas Adams put it (I'm paraphrasing): If someone offers a poacher $15 to kill a rhinoceros, and someone else offers him $20 not to kill it, the poacher will realize that he's in a position to make $35 off the same animal.
  • That's why I love Douglas Adams. *waves towel*
  • I think it's about time to move my towel from its position at half-staff... My google-fu failed me looking for that particular quote, but I did uncover this other piece of rhino-oriented wisdom: As Douglas Adams put it, "There is a widespread myth about what people want rhino horns for
  • Umm ... so, I have to ask ... what do people actually do with a rhino horn? *grimaces, clenches*