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There's no .htaccess needed to solve this. All they need to do is simply stop their illegal activities against me. Sure, I can afford a lawyer to fight these people. And with enough loopholes I could even get a Russian lawyer to deal with the guy from Russia, but do I want to waste my time and thousands of dollars to fight people that are spamming me or stealing my content?
TrafficMagnet sucks. I tried calling 'em, e-mailing 'em, faxing 'em. I was on the phone with their host, they couldn't do anything. Still I continue to get their spam e-mails over and over. No way to get off the list. And spidering sites like mine for e-mail addresses of other webmasters. Do I spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer to get these guys to stop? No... do they continue to spam people, totally ignoring any requests from others? Yes (check the searchengines for trafficmagnet). Do I get pissed? No, but I did get their attention. Two e-mails from them so far to ask me to stop. I told 'em it could be easily stopped. Just give me a phonenumber that works. I'd love to discuss this with 'em. In the mean time I got another spam e-mail... go figure
As for the Russian guy stealing links. He didn't react to my e-mails, his host didn't react to my e-mails (I suspect it's the same guy, so he's on dedicated hosting). Obviously I made sure there was no free host involved on this. Don't want to let innocent bystanders take a blow over this as well.
What we're looking at here is not a simple legal issue. By definitions of a DOS attack I'm not DOS attacking. By definition of hacking I'm definately not hacking. But by definitions of spam I think trafficmagnet is not spamming either. They have an opt-out link which is required. Nowere does it state that opt-out link should actually work. So theirs doesn't. Stealing links is an easy one, that is illegal, and that was proven in court in 1999 when I sued someone over this.
These two companies can solve this matter very easily. The Russian guy should take down the links he copied from me. I'll be willing to even mail him a sincere apology for the drastic measures I took against them. Trafficmagnet can solve their issue by stopping the spam they send out to people. And by stopping to harvest my site for e-mail addresses.
Some may not agree with me on this, but the way I see the Internet right now is half lawless... It's like the wild west where the sherrif takes care of the legal works, but people have to come up for themselves as well 'cause the law simply doesn't provide the protection it should. I didn't do this overnight. And I did give this a lot of thought. I might take both links off my site soon to see what happens. If these two companies continue their ways I will put 'em back though. I told both companies what I would do up front. TrafficMagnet was added as soon as I received another spam e-mail from them, the Russian guy was added 'cause he didn't reply to any of my e-mails for over a week but kept updating his page with stolen links.
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