111–120 of 382 posts
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You’ve clearly never dealt with lawyers very much. The implied threat is pretty obvious to those that have.
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Fully agreed. I'm shocked she gave a random unsolicited emailer the time of day. Most problems are ones we create for ourselves. Responding to spam and then feeling like you've been the victim of some injustice that the spam didn't say "hey, I'm not really spam, I'm grad-student flavored spam" is quite a take. Here's a tip for anyone not running a business: If your response is legally required, it'll come in the phys…
Certified mail or trash, there's no way to even know if an email was really delivered to a recipient anyway. I'm aware of read receipts but they aren't reliable.
I have a not at all popular and rarely used blog. I still get dozens of stupid spam emails and comments a day and often some phone calls too. This would not have caught my attention for more than 10 seconds, if I even read it at all and it did not get filtered out by various spam tools. I am quite perplexed at the people who panicked over this. It would probably rank 4th in the scariest things I have received today a…
A human research study? Give me a fucking break. >someone asked me a question and it scared me
What are the legal requirements for a blog run out of American servers by an American to be GDPR compliant these days? I'm sort of wondering whether you can get away with responding to such a request these days with "I am not in a jurisdiction that is obligated to comply with that law, and if you choose to charge me with violating it I am not under obligation to defend myself in court nor render myself for judgment?"
Your location and jurisdiction are mostly irrelevant - you’re obliged to comply with that law when you offer a your website in Europe. Of course the only possibility of enforcement is also in Europe, so there’s not much going to happen.
I suppose if you ran a rogue business then in theory credit card funds from European customers could get frozen by a court or something - but let’s be clear, GDPR is aimed at regulating big business primarily. Nobody is coming after your blog
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I'm sorry but how can you make the assumption that "life must be quite stressful for her overall."? We know almost nothing about her life or what kind of situation she is in... It seems a little weird to make such large assumptions about anyone who you don't personally know!
This week only I've been threatened to have videos taken from my webcam released - unless I pay a ransom - and I was asked to pay due bills in the attached zip file twice. And that's only what my spam filter did not catch. Given that they were targeted here, this person has a public mail address, so it's very likely they receive similar spam. Given that and the observation that they seem to be stressed by spam, this…
Can someone help me understand the ethical problem here? If I as an ordinary citizen contacted the webmaster with a similar worded email, the result would have been the same. The fact is that this “experiment” did not create any more or additional stress than is created for normal citizens/businesses simply engaging in normal legal activities. If submitting such a request has the potential to cause such undue stress,…
Perhaps you're making an assumption that "normal citizens" receive legal threats regularly? I can count the legal threats I've received on one hand, and I can assure you the days following them were, unfortunately, quite unpleasant (fortunately nothing came of it). Stress aside, part of the problem is the very real possibility of a subject wasting money on hiring a lawyer.
I consider myself a normal citizen and I receive "legal" and "illegal" threats regularly, the very vast majority being scam attempts of course.
Recently e.g. scammers keep telling me that my website's imprint is not up to code[0], either threatening to sue or outright claiming they are in fact a law firm and want a cease-and-desist and compensation for their law work, of course.
I also noticed how the Indian and Pakistani "security researcher" scammers[1] telling me about "major vulnerabilities" in my website - aka missing DMARC/DKIM headers (which are not even missing) - also started telling me how one can be fined under the GDPR for "bad security".
As for the "illegal" threats... I, according to scammers at least, watch a lot of "bad" porn[2] and they know about it because they hacked me, and recorded me on my own webcam. But if I paid them some BTC/monero/whatevercoin ("Follow this link to learn how you can easily buy "), they wouldn't rat me out to my family/friends or the police. I guess I will just have to pay them, but then again I have a HUGE payday coming from that nice Nigerian prince and another from that fantastic Singaporean economic attaché... once I send them some bucks to cover processing fees, of course[3].
All joking aside tho, I get how some people may be scared by things like the CCPA emails, or the kind of emails I mentioned (if those didn't work enough times, scammers would have stopped by now). When I just read that particular email in the article, I didn't see a legal threat, but that's just me of course. Other people might read it differently, and I cannot fault them for that. I remember being concerned myself the first time one of those "imprint" scam emails made it through the spam filter.
[0] In Germany, commercial websites are legally required to have an imprint, and everybody can basically sue you if you mess that up, that much is true. It's also true that courts regularly rule that if you profit even from a private website, e.g. by displaying ads, then your website is in fact commercial and requires that imprint.
https://www.bmjv.de/DE/Verbraucherportal/DigitalesTelekommun...
[1] This isn't to denigrate all Indian or Pakistani people, of course. It's just that the "security researcher" scammers I encountered thus far all operated from these two nations.
[2] Ranging from "homosexual" to "child". I wouldn't consider adult gay porn "bad" myself at all (just not interesting to me), that's their definition. It's quite interesting to me to see how they try to phish for closeted gay people more often than for pedophiles, at least anecdotally from what makes it to my spam folder. My guess is that the number of people who actually watch gay porn and are ashamed of it largely exceeds the number of people watching child abuse porn.
[3] I received those "huge money - pay fee" scam emails more than 20 years ago, and I still receive them today. Cannot argue with success, I guess?
I have a not at all popular and rarely used blog. I still get dozens of stupid spam emails and comments a day and often some phone calls too. This would not have caught my attention for more than 10 seconds, if I even read it at all and it did not get filtered out by various spam tools. I am quite perplexed at the people who panicked over this. It would probably rank 4th in the scariest things I have received today a…
Exactly. Maybe we need better internet safety education like my 13 year old gets in school. One of the topics is “ways to identify spam”.
What are the legal requirements for a blog run out of American servers by an American to be GDPR compliant these days? I'm sort of wondering whether you can get away with responding to such a request these days with "I am not in a jurisdiction that is obligated to comply with that law, and if you choose to charge me with violating it I am not under obligation to defend myself in court nor render myself for judgment?"