If you notice tomorrow that your inbox is a little less crowded, it might be because a Seattle jail cell is a little more full.

Federal authorities today arrested Robert Alan Soloway for mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, money laundering, and impersonating the licentious wife of a Nigerian oil minister. (okay, we made that last one up) But they did slam him with a 35 count indictment.

The young internet entrepreneur alledgedly crossed over to the dark side when he used hijacking viruses to take over the computers of unsuspecting internet users. Hunting down vulnerable pcs on local cable networks and DSL, he would (alledgedly) load a remote email module which could be activated at his discretion. This allowed him to steal bandwidth from various ISPs, cable companies. etc. and use their networks to distribute his marketing materials. In his scheme, he not only stole bandwidth, time, attention and resources of his recipients, but also the network resources of his unconscious slave mailers.

“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.”

Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that — even with four bank accounts seized by the government — he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer.

He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp.

He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else’s Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison, though prosecutors said they have not calculated what guideline sentencing range he might face.

The investigation began when the authorities began receiving hundreds of complaints about Soloway, who had been featured on a list of known spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization.

The Spamhaus Project rejoiced at his arrest.

“Soloway has been a long-term nuisance on the Internet — both in terms of the spam he sent, and the people he duped to use his spam service,” organizers wrote on Spamhaus.org.

Our own Aaron G. has volunteered to serve on the Jury, but will likely be declined due to his regular calls for the death penalty for spammers

Tune in for our upcoming broadcast segment on protecting YOUR PC from zombie overlords.

I don’t envy much, but I lurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrve the inventor if teh interweb’s LCD footprint.

Al Gore still needs to work on curtailing all that “dead tree version” media on his desk.

I’m No Luddite, but… is this an example of a corporate model of “do no evil“? (see #6)

… ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

Or is it an example of their doing Jeeves better than Ask did? Or Big Brother?

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Via BoingBoing:

Fair(y) Use Tale: AMAZING video cuts up Disney to explain copyright

Bucknell prof Eric Faden has produced the most amazing video mashup I’ve ever seen: “A Fair(y) Use Tale” cuts together thousands of extremely short clips from dozens of Disney cartoons, lifting indivudal words and short phrases to spell out an articulate, funny, and thoroughly educational lesson on how copyright works. This is the most subversive and hilarious use of Disney material I’ve ever seen — and there’s even a really smart chapter about why Faden used Disney material to make his film. This should be required viewing in every K-12 classroom in the country.

Link to:

• Coral Cache link to MP4 download
• Stanford page
• another mirror

For your immediate gratification, while it lasts:

ZDNet has an article entitled Massive Surge in Spam.

I’ve often made the argument that we hardly take the cost of spam seriously enough. May I suggest that we consider spam as micro-kidnappings or distributed shortening of lifespans. How so?

Let’s say a professional spammer sends out, conservatively, 100 million spams a week (article regarding one spammer allegedly having sent over 2 billion spams) and that each spam requires merely three seconds of human time (Australia’s Internet expert says 5 seconds per ) invested either in

• hitting a delete button
• working to purchase anti-spam software
• configuration and updating of the aforementioned software
• hiring technical staff at one’s company to address spam or
• any number of other incidental costs
• helping non-techie relatives and friends deal with their spam problems
• venting on a blog about the spam problem

300 million seconds is 5,000,000 minutes or 83,333 hours or 3472 days or 9.5 years of human potential stolen… per week. Allowing one spammer to continue like this for two months would exceed the average lifetime of human potential.

Let’s not even discuss what the billions spent on ameliorating spam could do if available to be used in healthcare, instead.

So, to address this, I’ve created a Spam Is Murder counter: Virtual Human Deaths by One Spammer calculated since the beginning of the 21st Century (that’s 1 January 2001, folks). That’ll appear in the left sidebar for a long time.

Of course, there are other solutions to the problem of spam.

What’s your solution?

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are not shared by the entire staff of TechTalk.

Experiments with different beverages and snack food..

My kids liked when I bought Diet Coke and Mentos last summer. Now I gotta try some of these.

File under kewl.

New clients… can’t live with ‘em and can’t live without ‘em.

Don’t get me started on why I suddenly feel the need to post this joke.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion.

My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has.

I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

Long before he voiced South Park’s Chef, Isaac Hayes was probably most famous for his theme song to the classic 70’s movie Shaft. Pardon the parody, but the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the consortium of companies that oversees DVD copy protection, would not like us to sing this tune:

You see this HD DVD encryption shafting is a bad mother–
(Shut your mouth)
But I’m talkin’ about shafting HD DVD encryption
(Then we can digg it)

Go read Social networking gets major challenge at Digg

Oh, and as of today, there are 1.7 million sites that Google sees mentioning 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-+63-56-88-c0