Without much further ado, herewith a template that you can use to send some demands to companies that sell your private information to spammers.

Dear Member1, Member2, Accounting Officer,

I have been receiving a number of unsolicited, spam, messages from various South African businesses over the past couple of months. I have been responding to these messages with the following communication:

Please remove me from your ALL of you mailing lists with immediate effect (including and not limited to any or all information you have about me). I categorically state that I have never requested any emails from XXX never heard of them and have never given permission for XXX to contact me.

In this regard, I refer to the ECT Act of 2002:

Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. 2002

Chapter VII – Consumer Protection

45. Unsolicited goods, services or communications

(Section 45 of the ECT Act)

1) Any person who sends unsolicited commercial communications

to consumers, must provide the consumer

a) with the option to cancel his or her subscription to the

mailing list of that person; and

b) with the identifying particulars of the source from which

that person obtained the consumer’s personal information, on request

of the consumer.

As such, in terms of section 45(1)(b), I would like to formally request the source from which my details was obtained. The full act can be obtained here: http://www.acts.co.za/ect_act/index.htm.

Failure to provide me with such information in terms of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, is an offense punishable by a fine or imprisonment of up to 12 months, as per the act (section 45(4) read with section 89(1)), and will be reported to the South African Police Service as such.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME

By way of this, I have now determined that you are the source of my personal details being distributed, in fact selling it for gain. In this regard, I would like to start off this interaction with demanding that you remove all and any of my email addresses and other contact detail you hold about me from your databases.

Going further, I hereby formally request, where you obtained my personal information, as per the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. I confirm that I make this request from you as the principal member of XXX CC, with XXX CC’d in as the registered accounting officer of the said CC.

In this regard I would like to confirm that sections 332(2) and 332(5) of the Criminal Procedure Act reads as follows: “In any prosecution against a corporate body, a director or servant of that corporate body shall be cited, as representative of that corporate body, as the offender, and thereupon the person so cited may, as such representative, be dealt with as if he were the person accused of having committed the offence in question:” and “When an offence has been committed, whether by the performance of any act or by the failure to perform any act, for which any corporate body is or was liable to prosecution, any person who was, at the time of the commission of the offence, a director or servant of the corporate body shall be deemed to be guilty of the said offence, unless it is proved that he did not take part in the commission of the offence and that he could not have prevented it, and shall be liable to prosecution therefor, either jointly with the corporate body or apart therefrom, and shall on conviction be personally liable to punishment therefor.”

I have confirmed your contact details and the fact that you receive your emails this specific email address and as such I infer that you will receive my email timeously. As such, I am looking forward to your positive response hereto by close of business on DATE A WEEK FROM NOW, which I would submit is more than reasonable in light of your regular access to your email. Failing the aforesaid, it is my sincere intention to lay a criminal complaint against OFFENDING CC, citing you as the responsible member of the CC, as per the registration held at CIPRO (see below). I trust that we will be able to address this issue amicably and that the aforesaid would not be necessary.

I earnestly await your further response.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME

If you get no response from the contact-selling-co, you should be well positioned to lay a criminal complaint against the members of the CC (or, directors of the company). It might be prudent to send a copy of your email to the company’s registered address by registered post (courts love registered post, especially more so than email at least), maybe even a copy to the acounting officer’s address (again using registered post). This you can also give to the police to help them, together with all the research on where to find the offenders.

I would love to hear from any readers who had success with this approach… Hopefully the new up and coming Protection of Personal Information Bill (soon to be an Act) will protect consumers even more. Once the Bill has been promulgated into an Act, I will look update the templates. Until such time, Good luck in fighting the good fight!

Maybe you are so lucky to receive a reply from a spammer, telling you where they got your contact details from and it seems as if your details where bought from a provider. What now?

First, you need to do some homework.

You will have to get the information of the company – most probably your information is sold by a Close Corporation or (Pty) Ltd company. This you can do on the Cipro website, either from the company’s registration number (most effective, so try and get this from the spamming company), or the company’s name.  To get hold of the director/member’s details, you have to search for the company  by searching with the CC/Co’s registration number (look on the left hand side of the screen). For a R30 fee, you can get all the spam-list-selling company’s contat details, registered offices, registered members/directors (with ID numbers), etc.

Your research is not yet over – try and get as much information as possible about the offending contact-selling-co. From the details that you get from Cipro, you can get hold of the accounting officer’s contact details by contacting the accounting officer’s professional body (for example, SAICA or SAIPA: a written request for the contact details is normally sufficient to get hold of the info).

Other good sources for information is to do credit checks on the members of the CC (remember, you got the ID number of the members/directors from Cipro), where you should be able to find most of the members/director’s contact details such as telephone numbers or addresses.

Don’t forget to try avenues such as google, facebook and linkedin to find more information about the people behind the contact-selling-co. Contact-selling-co’s will have to somehow be available online for people to find them, otherwise they won’t have much business.

A honeypot set up specifically to draw the contact-selling-co in to divulge some information might also be a good avenue to gain more insight in to the workings of the company (and probably some more contact information too).

Next up: a template to send to the contact-selling-co…

The amount of spam from South African companies seem to be getting more and more… br!ghtshark has been starting to reply to these spam messages, using the following template (developed in conjunction with johannschwella):

Dear XXX, [The name of the person can be found via the domain name records, doing a google search or by visiting the company's website]

Thank you so much for the free spam email advertising your business “business name” (email below).

Please remove me from your ALL of you mailing lists with immediate effect (including and not limited to any or all information you have about me). I categorically state that I have never requested any emails from XXX never heard of them and have never given permission for XXX to contact me.

In this regard, I refer to the ECT Act of 2002:Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. 2002

Chapter VII – Consumer Protection

45. Unsolicited goods, services or communications

(Section 45 of the ECT Act)

1) Any person who sends unsolicited commercial communications

to consumers, must provide the consumer

a) with the option to cancel his or her subscription to the

mailing list of that person; and

b) with the identifying particulars of the source from which

that person obtained the consumer’s personal information, on request

of the consumer.

As such, in terms of section 45(1)(b), I would like to formally request the source from which my details was obtained. The full act can be obtained here: http://www.acts.co.za/ect_act/index.htm.

Failure to provide me with such information in terms of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, is an offense punishable by a fine or imprisonment of up to 12 months, as per the act (section 45(4) read with section 89(1)), and will be reported to the South African Police Service as such.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME HERE

For good measure, also find the email’s message information by right clicking on the email in your Outlook inbox, selecting “Message Options” and then copying the Internet Headers section of the message. In these headers you will also many a time find a section with “X-AntiAbuse:” where you will find details of where to report the spam to as well – most service providors will blacklist a subscriber which repeatedly receive such complaints. Paste a copy of the entire message header in to your reply to the company and CC the anti-abuse contact email to the mail as well. If the email was sent using a recognised email providor such as hotmail, gmail, webmail, etc, you can assume that the abuse email address is “abuse@” (ie, abuse@hotmail.com, abuse@webmail.co.za, abuse@gmail.com, abuse@yahoo.com, etc – you get the picture).

Most spammers won’t reply, but sometimes you will receive replys of confirmation that your address has been removed from their database. Sometimes you will be so lucky as to receive a reply from a company, telling you where they got your contact details from. If this happens to you, have a look at my other “Spam Busting” post.

Which one would you choose?

“

While most people try to avoid becoming embroiled in legal proceedings, there are some that seemingly cannot get through the day without their fix of issuing summons or launching some application. And no, this does not only happen in America or on television – even boutique firms in Cape Town get the odd enquiry from a person that wants to sue the Minister of Justice (and everybody else) for a R100 million because, ever since his father apparently shot him ten years ago on their front lawn to impress random girls walking by, everybody has conspired against him and caused him to lose his marbles. “Everybody” will inevitably also include the attorney who shall, after listening politely to his ramblings for an hour, decline the offer to represent him.

The ones that are dependant on attorneys are easy enough to stop – most attorneys simply won’t act on their behalf if it is clear that the intended legal proceedings are frivolous or vexatious. But beware the person with some legal background (usually an unfinished law degree or sometimes simply some self-taught knowledge of the court rules) that represents himself – they usually have fools for counsel.

Last year the Cape Argus reported of a Cape Town man that was apparently involved in 15 legal proceedings at the time, including several labour-related matters against his former employer, Mr. Delivery, proceedings The Cape Town International Convention Centre and a R300 million action against Media 24 after Die Burger published a report about him. The man was apparently a part-time law student that drafted his own documents.

Most attorneys or advocates who have been chastised in court by a judge or magistrate would admire the thick skin and tenacity of the average vexatious litigant. Continued lack of success and criticism from the bench just do not seem to stifle their lust for litigation. In reviewing the plethora of proceedings instituted by a particular set of litigants, the Court in Ernst & Young and Others v Beinash and Others 1999 (1) SA 1114 (W) characterised the proceedings, variously, as an abuse of Court procedure to wage a personal vendetta; proceedings launched without reasonable grounds constituting persistent and vexatious proceedings or proceedings which had the effect of being vexatious; proceedings aimed at harassing and inconveniencing the respondents involved in them; action launched recklessly and without any reasonable grounds at all and without any prospect of success; proceedings constituting an expensive source of inconvenience and aggravation in the relentless pursuit of the their ulterior purpose; and an irrational, unbalanced and reckless devotion to a vendetta they had decided to wage against their opponents. At that stage their tally was such: of the 45 different proceedings they had instituted 27 had been unsuccessful, they succeeded in one application for leave to appeal (although the appeal was later dismissed) and 17 matters were unresolved.

Luckily the Vexatious Proceedings Act (Act 3 of 1956) offers some manner of protection against these litigious fiends. The State Attorney or any other person may, in the circumstances set out in Sections 2(1)(a) and (b) respectively, apply for an order against a vexatious litigant to the effect he or she may not institute legal proceedings without the leave of the court. If that person then does institute any proceedings in contravention of the order, shall be guilty of contempt of court liable for a fine or to imprisonment for not more than six months.

But seriously, what would the practice of law be without the likes of Mr Fitchet in the saga of Fitchet v Fitchet 1987 (1) SA 450 (E)? Every now and then, for the sake of practitioners’ morale, we do need someone to claim that a random third person conspired with his ex-fiancée’s mother to assassinate him by driving his car out in front of Mr Fitchet while he was travelling down a hill on his bicycle, and thereby trying to cover up the attempt on his life as a motorcar accident; and, four years later when the driver emigrated to Australia (apparently because the details of the attempt on Mr. Fitchet’s life leaked out); the driver and the ex-fiancée’s mother then conspired to get the ex-fiancee’s mother’s attorney’s daughter to induce Mr. Fitchet to marry her solely in order to obtain false mental illness diagnosis, by getting Mr. Fithcet ill with drugs and lying to a doctor regarding his bahaviour; his wife then divorced him with a “summons filled with lies” and he lost everything.

The learned judge, to his credit, remarked that he was “satisfied that plaintiff’s claim against [Mrs. Fitchet] is one standing outside the region of probability altogether”.

A what?

What is a torrent you may ask? A Torrent is basically a bookmark of files kept all over the internet and on users’ computers across the internet. Torrent sites collect these bookmarks and make them available so that other users can load the bookmark and automatically pull bits and bobs of the same file from all across the internet – with the resulting file being a perfect copy of the original file.

So what?

RiSA issued so-called take-down notices on a number of internet service providers in SA where a number of Torrent sites were hosted. A take-down notice is an American invention, now entrenched in the South African Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, whereby ISP’s can escape liability from third parties (copyright owners for example) if it responded on a take-down notice (in which a copyright owner will claim its copyright) whilst the facts surrounding the copyright are investigated and proved.

According the RiSA the South African Torrent sites infringed on its members’ copyright and are piracy-centric sites. After the take-down notices were served on the ISP’s (via the ISP Association_, the sites were closed down – to the great chagrin of the local online community.

To the rescue

A local lawyer jumped in on the behalf of the Torrent sites (pro bono) and made some very interesting legal points about the take-down notices and RiSA’s actions:

1. The sites do not actually host any copyrighted material – this is hosted by the user on the other side of the “bookmark” and downloaded by the person using the “bookmark”.

2. RiSA does not have the necessary locus standi (legal standing) to issue the take-down notices, since in terms of the South African Copyright Act, only the copyright owners themselves would be able to institute legal proceedings for the infringements.

3. In terms of the SA’n constitution everyone has a right to be heard in court (access to the courts) and by merely taking down the sites, the ISP’s might have acted unconstitutionally by not allowing the Torrent sites to state their side of the story.

We take your point

The lawyer also warned of civil claims against the ISP’s and RiSA for the infringements. All-in-all, these points made the ISP’s and RiSA sit up and listen, whom have now offered to sit down with the Torrent sites and negotiate. RiSA has also indicated that whilst the issues are being ironed out, that they will not send out any more take-down notices.

The BSA is a private body funded by the big software houses to look after the said software houses’ interests. They of course have a huge interest that piracy is curbed, because this means a direct contribution to their respective bottom lines.

The BSA claims that Microsoft estimates that for every $1 spent on production of the software, $9 worth of revenue is generated within the local economy in which it distributes. The BSA also claims that if software piracy is reduced by 10%, an additional 1200 jobs can be created within the IT sector, R6 billion in economic growth and R480million in tax revenues. The BSA also calls software piracy “dangerous” which sounds quite alarmist to br!ghtshark.

To combat piracy, the BSA has now started a campaign in which employees can report software piracy to the BSA. If the business is found “guilty” of software piracy, the whistle-blower can receive a reward. The reward is basically paid for from the software licensing fees generated from the tip-off – in general when the BSA engages with a business on software piracy they will put pressure on the business to become legal first, with the purchasing of legitimate software licenses. To the skeptical ear this does sound a little like a kind of blackmail, but be that as it may. The whistleblower will then receive 10% of the software licensing fees generated from the tip-off, up to a maximum of R100 000.

That being said, one would have to look at the actual cost of software licensing and the social cost of blowing the whistle on South African employers to the benefit of international or foreign entities. The whistle blower could very easily find himself without a bonus, or even worse, an employer if the cost of the software comes to a very large amount. In the current rocky financial times, this rings even more true.

So, what could one do to go the legal on the software without going illegal in a different manner and following the Somali’s example by turning into a different type of pirate to finance all of the licensing? One manner is to join the ranks of global giants such as Google, YouTube and Yahoo. Globally governments are also cottoning on and the governments of Australia, New Zealand and even South Africa are switching from retail software to Open Source software.

Open Source Software is software available for free, usually downloadable and is collaborative piece of software (ie, developed by collaborative contributors from all over the world). A full description of Open Source Software can be read (here) on Wikipedia, which in itself is an excellent example of an open source solution at work. If you don’t want to kill your broadband limits (or data cap), you can also get copies of the software from Freedom Toasters located nationwide (a Shuttleworth initiative).

There is practically a piece of Open Source Software to replace any of your current (un)licensed pieces of software. The most well-known pieces of Open Source Software are OpenOffice (a word processing suite, competing with Microsoft Office), Thunderbird or Gmail (email clients, competing with Microsoft Outlook) and Linux (an operating system, competing with Microsoft Windows).

Give it a try – tons of others have and have saved a bundle (of BSA-related-stress and $$) in the process.

There is no doubt about it – generation X and Y is firmly rooted online, especially with the advent of mobile phones with internet browsing capabilities. The battle of politics has always been to get the right information to the right people, right on time.

This shift can be seen very well in the current American presidential race, where voters could watch live debates between the candidates online – with the added functionality that viewers could discuss points and pose question between each other directly online.

In South Africa, the electronic political race has had a very slow start, with sms technology leading the way during the current political changes taking place in SA. There were also reports of sms campaigns doing the rounds, calling for certain politicians to be ousted from Government and to start a new political party.

Back in the day, one particular South African politician was quite innovative when it came to technology and actually installed a webcam in her office so that supporters can see her at work. Most South African political parties have an online email newsletter and some even runs a blog.

However, a quick search on the youth’s loved facebook, shows that the Democratic Alliance has quite a prominent and active community on facebook, with the DA’s seemingly official facebook group having a couple of thousand members. The ANC on the other hand does not seem to have any presence on facebook, since search results on “anc” merely brings up anti-ANC groups.

The younger generation lives, loves and laughs online and for political parties to be underrepresented online is quite a folly. In fact, br!ghtshark would venture to even say it is quite dismissive of the youth, to ignore their world smacks of ignorance and is very telling in the way which modern politics engages with the youth – possibly a reason for the political apathy under the youth.

So, for the not-so-tach-savvy-politician, is a guide to the most cutting edge ways on which to engage with the youth:

Facebook – the de-facto standard when it comes to networking (what is the art of politics other than networking in its oldest form) and crucial to start as a platform from which to engage with the youth. Incidentally, it is no longer only the youth that hangs out on facebook – more and more baby boomers are entering the facebook-fray. The DA has quite an impressive headstart on facebook, available here.

Twitter – a so-called “micro-blogging” platform, which allows for the distribution of instant “thoughts” to subscribers of the politician, so supporters can instantly keep track of where the politician is doing or thinking. The Americans have an excellent example at http://election.twitter.com/ where people can debate online and choose the follow the antics of their respective candidates online.

Youtube – The streaming video site has a function called “channels”, where politicians can go and post a series of video clips online, all kept neatly together in their channel. Youtube has even gone so far to set up a special website for their presidential election, called youchoose, where politicians can answer questions from voters directly online.

MySpace – This popular social network can also be very well used to start interacting with myspace users. The good thing with myspace is that politicians can customize their myspace pages, with voting boxes, video and photo-sharing functionality and even accept donations directly online. The American presidential race page on myspace, called myspace impact, shows exactly what can be done.

Good old blogs – a little bit more traditional, but can be used to easily and effectively spread the words, thoughts and ideas directly to the desktops of e-citizens all around.

Any other suggestions by my readers?

Over time there have been a lot of noise in the “Zuma-case” commentary, from some arrogant uneducated peeps, to some other inciting cartoonists who caused quite an uproar, to “the-guy-sitting-next-to-me-on-the-plane-on-Friday”.

The history to the case is quite long and involved, with numerous applications all over the world…

During all of this time, a large number of commentators where very, nay extremely, negative and sometimes even downright dismissive about the impartiality and reliability of the courts’ integrity. Some these comments included that if the court doesn’t find in Zuma’s favour, there will be mass picketing (YCL’s Mashilo) or that there will be people willing to kill for Zuma (ANCYL’s Malema).

In essence, a number of Zuma’s staunch supporters went out from the premise that the judiciary cannot be trusted to give the “correct” judgment.

Finally, on Friday past, Nicholson J, handed down his judgment in Zuma’s application in having the NPA’s prosecution scrapped because of policital interference in the advancement of the prosecution. Zuma (and his supporters) were vindicated and the prosecution of Zuma was striked.

What br!ghtshark fails to understand is how these supporters of Zuma, whom were all so disbelieving of the indepedence of the judiciary, can now so easily and triumphantly claim this judgment as a “victory” to be celebrated. If the judiciary was as unreliable as Zuma’s supporters made it out to be, this same logic should be applied to the final “victorius” judgment handed down by Nicholson J and should this judgment be viewed with much circumspect, but that is probably the illogical game of politicians and their antics.