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Amazing cluelessness
Raspberries all around on this article: E360 sues Web forum Nanae after Spamhaus lawsuit
First to e360insight LLC for starting another stupid lawsuit. According to the article:
What we’re trying to do with this new suit is to get to the truth of what’s behind these Internet forums. They incorrectly have been calling us “spammers” on their site. Also, they have been signing up for our e-mail newsletters and then collecting, like, 20 over a few weeks, then marking them all as spam in the same day, interfering with our relationship with our ISP.
Do people really trust their email marketing to this guy? Is he serious? Does he really not know what USENET is? Is it really some kind of thingy that you use Google Groups to see? What a maroon!
The thing is, he obviously believes that NANAE is some kind of thingy that you use Google Groups to see. We know this because he’s suing Tim Skirvin, who is the owner of the auto-moderation bot for the USENET group news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. Tim hasn’t called anyone anything, but he’s obviously responsible because he maintains the bot that approves the messages. Right?
No. All he’s doing is maintaining a bot that makes sure of one thing: the messages that come in are in the proper format. That’s all it does. Nothing else. It states no opinion. It holds no power.
But then we get to DM News. Even if David Linhardt is so clueless as to think that a USENET newsgroup is a website, NANAE is well-known enough that Dianna Dilworth, a reporter who is supposed to be covering this space, should really know better. But, she sent an email for comment to Bill Malloy, who owns NANAE.org and hasn’t been sued, instead of posting something to the newsgroup. Thus, “Nanae, a Usenet newsgroup whose Web site claims to be “dedicated to discussing e-mail spamming,” did not immediately return e-mails for comment.” really deserves to follow her wherever she goes in the future.
Now, you might also expect a reporter to at least be able to copy allegations correctly. But no. Apparently, Ms. Dilworth thinks that NANAE is doing things the long, hard way because she says they’re being sued for “tortuous interference”:
Now, the dictionary defines “tortuous” as:
tor·tu·ous (tôr’chōō-əs) Pronunciation Key
adj.1. Having or marked by repeated turns or bends; winding or twisting: a tortuous road through the mountains.
2. Not straightforward; circuitous; devious: a tortuous plot; tortuous reasoning.
3. Highly involved; complex: tortuous legal procedures.[Middle English, from Anglo-Norman, from Latin tortuōsus, from tortus, a twisting, from past participle of torquēre, to twist; see terkw- in Indo-European roots.]
tortuous. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tortuous (accessed: March 20, 2007).
But, the Complaint instead states a cause of action for “tortious interference”. “Tortious” means:
Main Entry: tor·tious
Pronunciation: ‘tor-sh&s
Function: adjective
: constituting a tort : recognized as a tort [a tortious act] [tortious interference with contract] —tor·tious·ly adverb
tortious. Dictionary.com. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law. Merriam-Webster, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tortious (accessed: March 20, 2007).
Yeah, it’s only one vowel. But you would expect a reporter to get that right when that one vowel changes the nature of the thing completely. Much like the difference between “car” and “cur”.
MickC @ March 20, 2007