A convicted spammer killed his wife and young daughter in an apparent murder-suicide Thursday while being sought after escaping prison last weekend, authorities said.
A teenage girl was shot in the neck and a baby was found unhurt in a car seat inside the vehicle where the three bodies were found, Arapahoe County undersheriff Mark Campbell said. The relationship between the girl, baby and the escaped convict wasn’t immediately clear.
The bodies of “Spam King” Edward “Eddie” Davidson, his wife, and 3-year-old daughter were found in an SUV parked in a farmhouse driveway in a rural part of Bennett, about 25 miles east of Denver.
“What a nightmare, and such a coward,” U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said. “Davidson imposed the ‘death penalty’ on family members for his own crime.”
Authorities had been searching for Davidson since Sunday, when he and his wife drove away from a minimum-security federal prison in Florence, 90 miles south of Denver.
What a miserable low-life!
Spamming penny stocks is far from being consistent with committing murder suicide. I’d say it’s more likely he panicked under the pressure of being under pursuit by the FBI, U.S. Marshals, the IRS and the Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force and having the whole internet including this site making fun of him with thousands of comments saying stuff like “Now, instead of two years at summer camp, he will go to many more years of Federal Pound-me-in-the-a$$ Prison.”
This guy was mentally ill, being like the first guy ever in the world to have to go to prison for spamming. With much larger spamming mafia operating from Russia or many other places in the world. Even most of US based marketing materials should be considered as spam, who doesn’t get their mailboxes full with unsolicited advertising. Who doesn’t wake up to thousands of unsolicited propaganda blog posts about whatever crappy product Apple just released?
I say it’s not this small spammers fault if the Email system doesn’t prevent spam. Doing a new email system that would prevent spam would be a logical thing to do for the government. They simply need new emailing standards with each email being assigned to verifiable identities and thus only ID-verified emails would show up in people’s inbox.
I would think the EMAIL design needs to be FIXED.
1. so that it can TRULY be tracked back.
2. REAL privacy.
3. Any server it touches leaves a trail.
So long to ANONYMOUS..
Yu, an independent internationaly trusted agency like ICANN should regulate an email-ID system. Basically it would be a way to register an email at a trusted email provider (such as Gmail, Yahoo and any other email service providers who would comply with strict technical and security rules) and register your email adress with your real identity. So that ICANN like regulation agency would have pretty robust systems in place to verify peoples ID. For example it could be charging a $0.XX amount on a credit card and waiting for the user to verify that as a verification code by looking up ones bank statements (a few days later when the little secret credit card charge turns up on a bank statement), it could be by verifying an adress by receiving a code in an envelope. It could be through a verification process with the trusted ISPs. Within a few months, everyone would have their emails registered by email-ID, and thus from then on it’d be default in any email reader such as Gmail to filter to only show emails from verified email-IDs in the inbox. Thus nobody would ever receive spam in their emails ever again.
This email-ID verification system would be compatible with any open-ID system such as Google Open Social and Facebook Connect and whatever other systems, which would be integrated in blog-comments and forum posts as well so you would never see any spam on those again either.
Come on, Charbax, don’t you think other people have tried designing systems that would put an end to spam ? It’s certainly not as simple as you describe.
And, by the way, ICANN is not an internationaly trusted agency.
Like Dvorak, I too don’t get SPAM. Well I do, but it always winds up in the trash folder of my web based email. I’ve got filters that only allow those I personally know to contact me, no matter how it’s addressed. All others have to spell my name correctly. SPAMMERS only get the domain name right, but quess the between quotes name wrong. I never post my real name anywhere for them to find it. And I don’t even give my ISP provided email address to relatives and friends, because they’d misuse message “forwarding” to spread stupid “joke of the week” messages, like chain letters. I’m sure there’s a way to data-mining those multi-name headers, at some point. The only thing I check my email trash folder for, is the rare message that winds up there, because I didn’t specify its passage in the filter. Like a response to a Youtube comment I left. So far, Youtube hasn’t passed any SPAM along via my email domian name.
I don’t worry too much about the feelings of scumbags who choose to be crooks. Even less so when they are murderers.
Leave that to priests and the rest of the crowd who derive their political income from being “forgiving”.
# don’t you think other people have
# tried designing systems that would
# put an end to spam ?
People have designed filters and algorithms, but that will never work as long as 300 million zombie Windows XP computers around the world relay spam emails using anonymous, hi-jacked and automatically generated or fake email accounts.
Blocking all incoming emails from people you don’t know defeats the purpose of email, which is to send messages to anyone over the Internet.
Identifying everyone once before they can use their email address would be a secure way to prevent spam. It doesn’t mean you cannot remain anonymous if you want using an anonymous email, it just means you have to register yourself with an independent organization such as some kind of ICANN which then can hold you accountable in case people complain about you sending out spam messages. If somehow your computer is hacked and a bot uses your ICANN-like-registered email account to send out spam, the people receiving the spam would mark it as spam and that ICANN-like organization will contact you and warn you that your email(s) have been blacklisted, possibly because your email account was hacked, until you resolve your problem.
# It’s certainly not as simple as you describe.
Filtering out anonymous messages sent from uncontrollable mail servers is what’s really hard, not even Google can filter that correctly, it’s basically impossible.
I think it would be much simpler to manage to simply register everyone and register every mail server and then simply go from there. Sure registering every email user in the world is a lot of work, but you only need to register everyone once and it can then also be used for spam-free blogging, blog-commenting, forum posting, spam-free social networking and many other places. That registration work doesn’t have to be centralized by only one ICANN-like agency, it could be handled by a whole bunch of registrar-like entities such as for example Google, Yahoo, Ebay-Paypal, Amazon and others could offer that service to people. Basically registering an email should be free thing to do, but several companies could be interested in doing that work so all they need is to get a registrar-status from a central entity that would manage the email-ID system globally.
I know BHO’s speach yesterday was a bit much, but there’s no reason to kill yourself: Even if he gets elected, his side isn’t organized enough to get anything done.
#11, Ah, but there is the crux. He may always organize to do something which is a far sight better than someone too stupid to realize there even is a problem.
#11 James Hill
Speaking of Obama – can you believe that guy? He goes abroad and rips his country then calls for a one world government.
Even though he fancies himself a messiah, early returns indicate that he’s working for the Antichrist.
Should have put him in a REAL PRISON, not a country club that he could walk away from !!! His wife and kid would still be alive today !!!
I don’t care what kind of crap this dirtbag was into – the woman and child deserved better. They should have never let this one escape. The lack of security at that prison contributed to the death of 2 innocents. Spamming! big f*cking deal, I’d say first degree murder is somewhat more serious. I mean, this man’s mental state had to be highly evident(imagine being capable of killing your daughter and her mother). I can’t believe that there was no one in the prison that was onto this.
From someone who gets 100 to 200 daily spam messages in my junk email folder at work I may be so bold to say fuck you. Its your attitude that personal responsibility is not important is what keeps spam alive and well. That’s like saying its not the drunk drivers fault that your family is dead, its the car company for making a car that allows a drunk to drive it.
#11 & #12
Just exactly how is the Presidential race part of this discussion? We call this “off task behavior” where I work.
To those of us that disinfect PCs BHO will always be Browser Helper Objects.
#18 for some here its a bit of a fixation. Everything relates to it somehow.
# From someone who gets 100 to 200 daily spam messages
# in my junk email folder at work I may be so bold to
# say fuck you.
I detailed the solution to fix the spam problem in my comment here, you don’t need to thank me.
Unlike the drunk driving problem, the unsolicited electronic mail problem can be solved by using plain computer technology for what it’s supposed to be used for, registering stuff and applying basic conditions to large databases.
Not much of a king !
Charbox,
I recommend you read up on “Yahoo Domain Keys” and “SPF” before you continue on the topic.
– Ben
Thanks mouring, DomainKeys and SPF sound interesting. But they still aren’t an Internet wide standard for identifying users and mail servers. It only identifies Yahoo and Google servers, and they may have algorithms to identify that their users aren’t bots or spammers. An worldwide email-ID registration system is required. And you say on your blog that you feel SPF is a broken protocol and weirdly enough in one of your latest blog posts, you wrote that you think spammers should die. It’s a really sad coincidence even though you probably didn’t really mean it..
I know this is completely off topic and the editors can pin a goofy little icon on my post.
Randy Pausch has died of pancreatic cancer. He was a virtual reality professor at Carnegie Mellon and is best known around the internet for his last lecture (see below).
When I look at Eddie Davidson and how he lived and how died I have a mix of negative emotions. I’m glad there are people in the world like Professor Pausch who can live, and die, with wit, humor, curiosity, love, and unflappable dignity.
Forget Eddie, remember Randy.
http://tinyurl.com/5ewtn3
The kind of guy who would spam is the same kind of guy who would die in a murder suicide.
The kind of guy who would out a CIA agent is the same kind of guy who would hit-and-run an old homeless guy with his Corvette.