Fired AOL Engineer gets 15 Months in the can
Comments(0)
Justice has been served:
A former America Online software engineer was sentenced yesterday to a year and three months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages.
“I know I’ve done something very wrong,” a soft-spoken and teary Jason Smathers told U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein.
Jason Smathers will be spending 15 months in jail and will pay $84,000 in liability to AOL. I find the sentence to be fair, even though it could be even more severe in order to set a legal precedent.
Speaking about AOL, this is from the Slashdot sea of comments:
America Online: A sucker born every minute…
According to a corporate press release dated June 16, 2000, America Online has surpassed the 23 million member mark. Founded in 1985, AOL has been a household name to novice computer users worldwide. Unfortunately, many of these novices don’t know that they’re only seeing a small portion of the Internet and are being limited by AOL’s proprietary and archaic interface.
Now, it’s fairly safe to make the assumption that at least a quarter of AOL’s 23 million customers are simply short-term users along for the free trial or jumping from service to service looking for the best deal. And, using that same line of thinking, roughly half of those 17.25 million remaining customers are probably smart enough to see AOL for what it really is and cancel their service in a desperate fit of fight or flight.
That leaves approximately 8.63 million customers that use AOL as their primary Internet Service Provider, give or take a random three quarter million people at any given time signing up or canceling. With this in mind, and approximately 7.88 million minutes in AOL’s 15 year history, this proves that a sucker really is born every minute.
Tags: In the news, Justice, Ouch!
Technorati Tags: In the news, Justice, Ouch!