

Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail - tokenadult
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/spam-back-to-94-of-all-e-mail/

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Femur
I'm curious as to what the overall "cost" of spam is. Other than the bandwidth
cost, is spam really that big of a problem? Both my work and personal
addresses rarely to ever have spam, so it really does not affect me in the
slightest.

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Hexstream
If the cost was really unbearable we'd have a secure mail protocol in
widespread usage by now. We might be better off if the problem became so bad
that we'd solve it once and for all.

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dfranke
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy>

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Hexstream
Not necessarily.

I'm not advocating more spam, just saying if there was more we might get more
serious about solving the problem (in the BWF story, people are advocating
more broken windows).

The fact that we're not as affected as we could be doesn't make the job of
spammers any less shameful (in the BWF story, the boy is hailed as a hero).

And I didn't say it would be good for the economy (unlike in the BWF story). I
said we might be better off, I didn't say in what way(s). I can tell I'd be
happier with life knowing spammers don't get rich spewing shit anymore.

If you implied I implied any of those things that's a bit insulting.

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dfranke
You said that we'd be better off if the problem became worse so that we'd be
more motivated to solve it. How can that be read as other than advocating (in
the short term) more spam? The point of the Broken Window parable is that even
in the long term we do not end up better off, because the people who spent
their time solving the spam problem could have put their energies into
something else productive instead.

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jedc
I remember reading about Microsoft Research's "Penny Black" project, where an
e-mail could be essentially certified as non-spam by various types of
currencies. (Such as computational cycles, cash, etc.) What I'm curious about
is how this would stand up to the networks of spam-bots... Again, it might
drive traffic down for a bit as each of their infected computers takes longer
for each e-mail, but I would assume they would just try harder to infect more.

(Link here: <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/>)

Do any spam experts have an opinion on this type of idea/project?

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wmf
If sending mail requires CPU cycles, then spammers will steal cycles. If it
requires real money, spammers will steal that.

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork2.pdf>

~~~
asciilifeform
> If it requires real money, spammers will steal that.

If you raise the cost of sending a single piece of spam sufficiently, spam
will vanish. Exactly the way junk snailmail would, if the US Postal Service
did not subsidize it.

~~~
wmf
_If you raise the cost of sending a single piece of spam sufficiently, spam
will vanish._

Assuming that sending spam costs the same as sending other mail, the cost is
limited by what people will bear for their legitimate mail. I claim that
spammers can simply steal enough money (possibly out of users' mail clients)
to pay for their spam.

~~~
Psyonic
If they could do that, why aren't they already? Certainly not for ethical
reasons...

~~~
wmf
AFAIK a lot of spam comes from botnets, which are stolen resources. Also, one
might argue that spammers are just people who are too dumb or too chicken to
engage in _real_ cybercrime, given that it appears to be more profitable.

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RK
Ignoring the effect of McColo, I wonder how the recession has affected
spammers. Are they making more money or less?

People "down on their luck" might buy more dubious crap. Businesses in more
desperate times might use less "palatable" marketing than they normally would.

~~~
mahmud
They are making more. With so many people scared for their future financial
stability, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that more people are more
likely to fall for a "get rich quick" scam. Sex-related spam might go down
with respect to male targets also, but you can bet some spam will appear
targeting women with "get rich quick stripping online (doing phone sex), etc".

Spam and most blackhat businesses are just that, business. The operators are
your average greedy bastards, the great majority of whom are technically
incapable twenty something men who think "the internet" is still in a dotcom
boom. I'm not pulling this out of thin air, all you have to do is lurk in spam
boards to see the prevailing mythology; a huge majority of 20-something
spammers who want to live the Hip Hop lifestyle and who will do anything for
money.

They themselves get scammed left and right by everyone from competent systems
programmers who sell them backdoored tools to sophisticated mafiosi who open
fly-by-night "online banks" to fake advertising networks that lure them into
distributing their spam links and malware and then fold just when it's time to
pay up, not to mention the ponzi schemes.

The life of a spammer is a bitch. If you were dealing drugs you at least have
your tangible goods in hand and cash proceeds in the other. Spamming is like
drug dealing, except someone keeps your stash and drop-ships it, and another
keeps your cash and gives you a metered ATM card, nickle and diming you in
every step of the way.

So the question becomes, what sort of spammer is making the real money (or the
most of it) instead of asking if all spammers are making moolah. And the
answer would be, the guys getting paid are not exactly in the spamming
business :-)

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patio11
I just want to say that this post comports to my experiences when I spent a
year on spam boards. (My employer was working on an anti-spam product -- know
your enemy and all that.)

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DannoHung
I don't get it man, I haven't gotten a spam email in months or at least weeks.

Don't these guys realize that it's just not getting through any more?

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windsurfer
Hey DannoHung, I represent the estate of a long-lost relative of yours...

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bianco
Following all kinds of human intercommunication, I'd say that this percentage
only reflects the equivalent of really important communication on the positive
side, and trash twitter (of our everyday life) on the other one.

