Now that's a change of pace; Microsoft suing someone else. Most of you probably already know that the Redmond Giant filed suit against a couple dozen alleged spammers last week, marking what was, as far as we can make out, the first positive thing the company had done since dinosaurs roamed the earth. Or so we thought. Now it turns out that at least one of the alleged spammers is apparently just some average guy now facing a big, scary lawsuit by one of the world's most powerful corporations. Yeeks.

Yup, according to a BBC NEWS article, a 43-year-old telecommunications engineer named Simon Grainger was slapped with the suit last week because he's the registered owner of a domain name that Microsoft claims was involved in some heavy-duty spammage. There's just one little problem: according to Spamhaus, yes, the domain name in question was used for spam, except that the spam all happened during a previous registration, long before the domain name was subsequently registered by Mr. Grainger. Steve Linford of Spamhaus is therefore "98% convinced that Microsoft has got the wrong man"; apparently Microsoft's spam investigation team, which the company bragged about having a "background in law enforcement," neglected to check a piddly little thing called a "date."

Chalk it up to yet another example of "bright idea, shoddy implementation" on Microsoft's part; once again, the company's Attention-To-Detail Deficit Disorder rears its ugly head. We're all for suing spammers, but geez, at least make the effort to sue the right people. Poor Simon says, "we've been told it could cost us a five-figure sum to fight this." Again, yeeks.

Interestingly enough, Bill Gates himself recently sent out a tirade about the evils of spam, vociferously proclaiming (without a hint of irony) spam to be "a drain on productivity, an increasingly costly waste of time and resources for Internet service providers and for businesses large and small [that] clogs corporate networks, and is sometimes a vehicle for viruses that can cause serious damage." Well, gee, Bill, does that mean Microsoft is going to reimburse the planet for the billions of dollars lost due to your company releasing such sievelike products as Outlook and Windows, which are responsible for millions of email messages auto-sent by worms like Love Bug, Anna Kournikova, Nimda, Sircam, ad infinitum? Or for posting Hotmail users' email addresses on a public web site for spammers to pick up in the first place? Cool. Where do we pick up the check?