Spam is Dead 485
Vainglorious Coward writes "Two years on from Bill Gates' promise to eradicate spam, an article in The Observer claims that spam has passed its peak and is now declining. Is it just me that hasn't noticed this?" I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
Words Matter (Score:5, Insightful)
As it stands, this is simply an opinion piece, and is labeled as such on the Observer's website. Apart from a loose reference to remembered statistics on the website of a company that sells spam-filtering software, there's nothing in the way of solid evidence to support this guy's claims. What's more, he asserts that things like phishing mails and penny stock solicitations somehow fall outside the realm of "spam". He further goes on to claim that the "new wave" of spam won't actually last, because things like penny-stock spam "rely on credulousness"; he basically asserts that common sense will prevail against the "new" spam where it failed previously. I seriously doubt that the same caliber of individual who falls for the Nigerian e-mail scam will somehow be immune to the siren call of the "penny stock" scam--which, incidentally, has been around for years.
While the author has some valid points, I think he's drawing conclusions on bad assumptions and gut reactions, not hard data.
Invalid association (Score:3, Insightful)
Something big begins to slow down.
Invalid conclusion: the two are associated.
Useful thought: maybe it would have slowed down by itself.
(I think spam must eventually tail off, because it operates on the basis of effort vs profit; as spam increases, I suspect the value of an individual spam decreases; it's not a stable system. In the end, the volume of spam should therefore level off, entirely without outside intervention.)
Mea culpa (Score:2, Insightful)
You're totally right, I should have written "piece", not "article".
/me lashes self
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hows that for a useless "me too" post?
Spam: The social problem (Score:2, Insightful)
0. There will always be a criminal element determined to make "a quick buck" without regard for others as long as there are people willing to do business with this criminal element (in this case, the spammers).
1. Many people use the internet who aren't computer specialists, thus are easily fooled by eMails which are designed to imitate messages normally generated by a trusted internet site (usually in an attempt to gain access to confidential information).
2. The up-front costs for the spammers are very low (and quite high for their victims, society, etc.), and there are no serious penalties thus the risks associated with getting caught are minimal (if there are any at all).
3. Marketers stubbornly and vehemently hate (in general) the idea that everyone has a right to "consent." Confirmed opt-in is key because "opt-in" alone isn't enough due to forgery.
There are many ideas for solutions, but unfortunately one of the big challenges societies face today is international differences when it comes to law & order, moral, ethical, and other standards. The internet, by its design, completely ignores international borders, and spammers are enjoying free reign as a result.
So far a combination of DNSBLs (DNS-based Block Lists) and various filters seems to work well for many ISPs, but spammers continue to find ways around these things, hence the fact that it is a social problem.
Education is key, but so far has proven to be impractical. Does anyone have any ideas for solutions (violence works, but is illegal in most civilized nations, so we need to be creative in a different way)?
P.S.: Challenge/Response systems are not the answer because they are, essentially, fighting abuse with abuse.
Re:Words Matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Small-time white-collar crooks like spammers tend not to be too bright, and are always trying harebrained schemes to get rich quick. I think it's perfectly possible that most spammers spam just because everyone else is doing it, and they wrongly believe it's an easy scheme to make money.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:5, Insightful)
spam is dead, long live spam (Score:5, Insightful)
spam/ drugs/ terror/ pedophilia/ etc. will always require personnel and effort to prevent, forever. it's just a cost of civilization. for to not fight these things allows them to proliferate and spread. it's a maintenance issue, just like taking out the trash to the curb every thursday. it's not like you take the trash out one day, and you never have to take it out again. no, trash constantly accumulates, and it always will. if you think terror, or hard drug use (really only hard highly addictive drugs are a problem), or spam, or pedophilia, or other problems like these, is something you can oppose or (even worse) accept, and the problems just go away, you simply don't understand what these problems are really like
every generation, there will be some group of idiots who think bombing the feberal building in oklahoma city or flying airplanes into office towers is a wise move. likewise, every generation some group of a**holes will see smuggling heroin and cocaine as a good business move (it is, but its the social byproducts of the business itself that is the problem). and, every generation, someone will think "hey, i can just send out a million emails." nothing you will ever do will stop such people from constantly being reborn anew in every generation, forever
these thinks, just like spam, must always be fought, for all time. yes, you can change protocols, but there is no technological fix to human ingeniousness and cravenness: someone will always try to game the system for their benefit, despite all of the suffering it creates for the rest of us. a lot of slashdot types would be thinking "technological fix!" "technological fix!"
true wisdom on the issue of spam and other social ills like it are ones of acceptance of the problem, and constant vigilance of the problem, at the same time. it's not like you can accept the behavior as OK, and its not like you can fight it and kill it once and for all. what is needed is more people understanding the true nature of social ills like spam/ terror/ hard drugs/ etc and understanding that, by their nature, they are mundane criminal policing issues like burglary and vandalism: always with us, but always unacceptable, all at the same time
this is wisdom on these issues. beware anyone who says you can accept these things, and the problems go away, or people who say you can fight these things, and kill them once and for all. such people don't know what they are talking about
Not quite dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Here we go... (Score:5, Insightful)
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Since when has Bill Gates... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should we trust him in his spam prediction ?
...oh and btw. mr. Gates my hotmail mailbox is beeing spammed with worthless info from MS...
--
Where is \ on a Mac ?
Spam still killing email (Score:2, Insightful)
Currently my account gets absolutely no spam, I have a second email account I use to sign up for stuff and funnily enough it gets no spam either. Spam filters may be getting rid of most spam but unfortunately sometimes they stop needed messages too. And the truth is so long as one person in a million responds to the spam messages then it's still worth it for the spammers
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually have a problem with ad blocking. I am well aware that a lot of sites depend on income from banner views and clicks. And since they offer their content free to me and I want it to stay that way, I usually do not filter banner ads. This is not a moral question, just a personal decision. I even click on ads if interested. But there is a limit how much annoyance I can bear, so I block pop ups and stopped visiting sites like macosrumors, which seem to try to compensate decline of content by increasing the amount of ads, page reloads, non working links etc.
Less spam? Or just seeing less of it? (Score:4, Insightful)
So he's not really getting any less spam at all, it's just getting hit on the head before it gets to his inbox.
I wonder if by "amount" he means "proportion"? With many more users getting on the internet now than "a few years ago" it's not surprising that the proportion of spam may have dropped a little (overall), but I'd be very surprised if there's actually less spam being generated.
In the last three years I think I've received one spam and two eBay phishing e-mails. I run my own mail domain, so when I register an e-mail address for anywhere I use nospam-[their domain]@[my domain]. This makes things very easy to trace and would seem to have some discouraging effect on places selling their address lists. The phishing e-mails were due to a hardware supplier whose customer database had been comprimised, for example.
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:3, Insightful)
We're switching 3 big companies from Exchange to gmail.
They'll save $100,000+ annually.
They'll have access from their cells.
They'll have reduced spam.
Vanity domains are a commodity for spammers. Gmail polices their network nonstop.
Professional? That title comes from doing your job ahead of time and under budget.
Re:Centralized Email (Score:2, Insightful)
Mailing lists would be completely shafted, and I for one would *not* pay any of these - I'm not in the US anyway, plus unless I was notified of the charge beforehand I would not consider myself liable (there is legal precedent for this.. that's why ATMs that charge you have to have 'you will be charged x for this transaction, do you want to continue or go to a bank that isn't so greedy' screens).
Tony
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:3, Insightful)
So this approach doesn't work very well at all.
Jason.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:4, Insightful)
C*al*s! XXX! Your PayPay Account (Score:2, Insightful)
* A few major spam court cases. Suddenly, there might be a downside to being a spammer.
* Filtering has made spam less effective with fewer people replying.
* People are more use to email and are less likely to respond to spam.
* Last, but not least: There is a self-regulatory process here. When there's too much spam, people, each individual piece of spam becomes less likely to be noticed. What are your chances of selling your junk if 10 other people have packed that mailbox with the same ad? Spammers drop out. This is where we are right now. Unfortunately, this tread won't last. Fewer spams means each piece of spam is more likely to get noticed and generate a response. Fewer spams means more people are starting to use their email. This makes spamming more effective which will attract more spammers.
I predict that we'll go through several waves of spam over the next few years as the amount of spam reaches its "optimal" level.
Re:spam is dead, long live spam (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with these never ending "wars" is that they keep building up. With this "nor should you think it wil ever end" mentality is that it gets to the point where you are actually making things worse by being so relentless. Take the war on drugs, for example. How many people are hurt because drug use is criminalized rather than treated as a health issue (which it is)? That is what you get when you start waging "war." How much farm land in Columbia is destroyed and people poisoned because the US dumps herbicides all over the place to kill coca crops? Lots. At some point you need to back off theses never ending "wars" and ask youself if the casualties are really worth it.
As for the "war on terror," how much terrorism is CREATED by the war on terror? You go into a country thinking you are going to kill all the terrorists and guess what? You've just pissed off a whole bunch of people who previously didn't feel particularly strongly. Also consider the freedoms that people are willing to give up once "war" declared. "War" is a very powerful term and I think we should reserve it for big things. Pretty soon people will start believing that "war is peace, peace is war."
And back on topic... why is there a "war on spam?" Just install damn filters and be done with it. Any half decent spam/virus filter (and there are many out there) can stop at least 90% of all SPAM. So what is the big deal? Just push your services provider to install better filters and get on with your life.
-matthew
Re:Oh Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, thanks for giving your financial support to spammers. YOU and others like you are the reason the rest of us get 30-something spams a day. Not to mention the unfathomably dumb way you chose to spend your money...
declining by # or declining by %age (Score:3, Insightful)
At first I assumed he was only couting spam that made it past the spam blocking softwares, but as it appears his theory is proven based on a different set of assumptions and facts.
His entire article bases on the fact that the % of spams from all emails caught has dropped. This can mean one or more of many things which only follows his theory.
1. Spam has actually decreased
2. Spam has found ways to avoid being detected
3. The volume of email has gone up, with more actual email while spam increased at a slower rate
Honestly, I'd like to see more statistics and figures to decide how spam has changed in these past few years. Just by looking at #s from one company and what percentage they've stopped isn't enough to say much in my opinion.
Re:Oh Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, so that's why the PhD was bogus! And here I thought it might be bogus because it was from an unaccredited university, because you bought it instead of taking the required courses, doing the thesis, and so on...
Please don't buy things from spammers, you're the reason the rest of us gets spam!
Re:i already addressed you in my orig comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparenly you don't solve it by going to "war" with it either. I'm not talking about acceptance. I am talking about doing what you can, but at a certain point recognize that you can only do so much before you are doing more harm than good.
there will always be malcontents who seek violence, and unconstrained access to highly addictive substances just results in a lot of addicts. do you deny either observation? then you don't understand what terrorism/ hard drug use really is
I understand that the magnitude of such problems are influenced by certain social and cultural conditions. There are conditions that tend to lead to drug addiction and terrorism. They dont' just come out of thin air for no reason. Sure, there are SOME people who are just "anti-social" and tehre are SOME people who who are just prone to drug addiction, but a significant portion get involved with these things for reasons that can be addressed without going to war with them.
simply put, every single negative you can demonstrate about the war on drugs/ war on terror i accept and acknowledge. except that the negatives of not fighting these things is worse. that's really about the entire argument we can possibly have on the issue,
Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't address theproblems. I'm just saying that "fighting" them isn't necessarily the answer. It is not difficult to see that many of the problems with drugs are CAUSED by our "war" attitude towards them. Do you understand the implication of the word "war?"
therefore, you wage war on heroin, meth, cocaine (the highly addictive drugs ONLY... marijuana, lsd, nonaddictive drugs: these should be legal), and you wage war on terror (bush invading iraq might be called part of "the war on terror", but again, the specifics of a flawed policiy don't matter to me, it's the PRINCIPAL of opposing terrorism that matters to me: you have to take out the trash, or it just accumulates and stinks up the place)
Sure, you have to take out the trash. But starting a "war on trash" would be ridiculous. Just take it out. No need to turn it into a battle between you and a bag of rubbish.
-matthew
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:3, Insightful)
Way back in the early days of banner ads, ISTM there were more interesting ads and fewer obnoxious ones. I even saved a few of the more clever banners.