
Spam Hits Lowest Levels Since 2008 (Did You Notice?) - neozhang
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/spam_hits_lowest_levels_since_2008_did_you_notice.php#.TgsItn1gyC4.hackernews
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bruce511
From the article: "Worldwide spam is now down to one in every 1.37 emails. In
the United States, spam accounts for 73.7% of all emails."

This is classic journalism, putting two related facts in the same sentence,
but in such a way as to make comparison really really hard.

It's like saying that the average height of people world-wide is 1.8m, but in
the US it's 6 foot. Huh?

So - for the record, 1 in 1.37 is 72.99%. So this sentence could, and should
read;

"Worldwide spam is now down to 72.99% of all emails. In the United States, it
accounts for 73.7% of all emails."

I'm guessing that .7% is well within their margin of error, meaning that the
paragraph overall is somewhat redundant.

Then a bunch of graphs, with no Y-Axis scale showing vast up and down
fluctuations further erode what credibility the author had left.

In short - a fluff piece devoid of the really interesting information.

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chalst
A fluffy piece but not one devoid of interesting information, at least for me
- I found the reminder of events over the last three years useful to putting
the numbers in context.

The most egregious misuse of numbers lies in the claim _[t]he geographic
center of spammed accounts has also shifted from Russia to Saudi Arabia_ ,
which is justified by the fact that Saudi Arabia (population of around 25
million) has a spam rate of 82.2% against Russia's (pop. c. 140m) spam rate of
79.4%. It's been a while since I've seen such extreme analytical incompetence
from a journalist.

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kalleboo
I suspect spammers have moved from email to the web. I'm seeing more
forum/comment form spam now than ever (especially on disqus sites, I've only
seen 1-2 spam facebook comments yet). Too bad web spam is basically impossible
to measure overall.

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getsat
It's usually just people running Xrumer[1] to get more backlinks to their
site. You can pay people $5 on fiverr.com to register 5,000+ forum accounts
and drop a link back to your site.

Backlinks = higher SERP positioning = $$$

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer>

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ColinWright
My rate of incoming spam has dropped from a peak of 2400/day in July 2009 to
under 100/day for the last three months. You can see more about it here:

<http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SpamGraphs.html?HN>

and here:

<http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SpamTable.html?HN>

You can also read something about these graphs from when I posted about them:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157769>

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Morendil
Yes: <http://bit.ly/lerK1S>

(This is a time series graph of the count of my GMail spam folder since 2009,
updated daily.)

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ColinWright
That's almost bump-for-bump identical to my data, only I show data going back
to 2002, and you're only showing back to 2009. The correspondence is
remarkable:

<http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SpamGraphs.html?HN>

~~~
Morendil
That's one reason I set up this cron in the first place - I wanted to see if
"my spam" was the same as "everyone else's spam".

I wish I'd had your foresight and set this up earlier, but now I'm glad I
didn't let that prevent me from doing it anyway; it's always fun to play
scientist. :)

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agj
I've noticed this trend directly. Our incoming non-spam rate has stayed steady
at an avg of about 10 msgs/min in the least few years, but our overall average
rate has dropped from 250 msgs/min to about 60 msgs/min.

Another trend that I've noticed recently, and what seems is an example of a
targeted attack, is an increase in brute force attacks on user accounts. This
is likely anecdotal though, if something works once for spammers, they are
pretty relentless at trying to attack it again.

I do find it interesting to watch these trends shift, and to have to respond
to new methods. It's a great, big, penis-enlargement-pill-fueled, game of cat
and mouse to me.

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georgemcbay
As a non-admin user, I haven't really noticed. Not because I still get a lot
of spam but because it hasn't been a problem for me for a few years now and it
continues to be not-a-problem.

With that in mind it makes sense that the levels are dropping... spam filters
have gotten good enough to make spamming not worth the trouble in terms of
effort/return (especially given the increased risk of a successful anti-spam
lawsuit against you as a spammer), so the levels drop, mostly invisibly to the
users who weren't seeing the majority of the spam in the first place.

