A pink contract is an agreement between an email spammer and the spammer's Internet service provider. The contract exempts the spammer from the provider's terms of service, which typically prohibit spamming. In return, the spammer pays far more money for his internet connection than non-spammers. AT&T got in trouble for such a contract.
The contract is called pink because that is the color of SPAM (the food), alluding to the fact that the contract enables spamming.
"Any ISP in the United States can get in real trouble for signing pink contracts. Problem is that there's a whole big world wide web out there and the bulk of the pink contracts are signed with overseas ISPs where US Federal Authorities have absolutely no power."
Famous quotes containing the words pink and/or contract:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)