Fighting Spam Through Regulation and Economics

Bryan29 writes ""Next door to our offices was a spam operation... One day they weren't there anymore". Apparently in the past several months some black hat SEO companies (comment spammers) closed shop. Mr. Evron explores using a couple of case studies how spam was directly impacted by the UIGEA online Casinos law, disallowing payment processing, and how the subprime mortgage collapse made many former clients of spammers "move on". The article draws its conclusions from an economic standpoint "Perhaps the next step policy makers should take is to work to change this economy, possibly by legalizing and regulating ... More to the point, they can make the act of processing funds for this type of operation illegal.""

Re:Gadi Evron = Hot Air

[arivanov]

Just read the article.

Gadi at his best.

First of all, the casino SPAM has not decreased. It has changed target markets. I got 10+ mails over the last month that managed to get past my antispam filters with gambling spams and scams. This is compared to under 3 for the preceding year. Mortgages - that disappeared at least one year before the credit crunch started. And so on.

The reason SPAM is decreasing is that the return on investment for spammers steadily decreases. People are responding to it less and less. As a result the vast botnets built for spamming are now geared towards phishing, identity theft (botnet ops are actually scanning computers for useable documents) and from time to time a bit of SPAM for the purposes of botnet expansion.

Most of the registrars are now "bad"

[Animats]

If instead ICANN had some cajones, they could take the bad registrars out...

The problme is that most of the registrars, by actual count, are now "bad". See the list of ICANN-approved registrars [icann.org]. There are several hundred, few of which have any real existence. Most are just fronts for some domaining operation. Some are obvious about it: "DropExtra.com, Inc.", "DropFall.com, Inc.", "DropHub.com. Inc", "DropJump.com, Inc.", etc., all of which are fronts for a "wholesale domain registrar". Then there's "Enom1, Inc."., "Enom2, Inc." ... "enom469, Inc.". Most of the "registrars" are now dummies like that.Those are ICANN's constituency.

Re:This one is better, but no cigar

[cyphercell]

Found it [craphound.com] it's like a failed decision support system that still works because there is no viable solution.

Looks like the author is Cory Doctorow [google.com]

Re:Cleanup Wall Street

[Ash Vince]

Start with the jittery oil speculators first and knock it down $30-40+.

It's not quite that simple I'm afraid. True a large part of the price of Oil is probably due to the speculation on its price you mention.

However there is also the inconvenient fact that we are not discovering new fields as fast as we are depleting mature fields beyond the point it becomes cost efficient to extract. We are also becoming a lot more adept at extracting oil from very mature fields but it still doesn't change the fact that Oil is a finite resource and it will eventually run out.

Then there is China. The Chinese demand for oil is growing at a staggering rate, both from the peoples desire to drive their own car to work and the countries industrial growth. India is also crying our for more oil due to their economic growth. The fact is the world needs more and more oil as these countries develop but it has less and less.

The oil that is left is becoming more concentrated in fewer and fewer countries in the middle east. It will not be long (50-100 years, I believe) before the only oil left in the world is under Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Unsurprisingly these countries are demanding top dollar for their oil. As less and less countries have oil to sell the remaining ones that do are going to charge more and more.

Re:Regulation will never work...

[Broken Toys]

I agree you that IF one can enforce regulations on the companies that hire spammers the situation might improve. However, IMHO, unless such regulations are vigorously enforced, the potential profits are always going to outweigh the possible penalties. Reputable companies don't use spammers to advertise. The situation is that disreputable companies are using spammers and there is no accountability.

Also a few years in a US prison might actually be an incentive to the 419 crowd. Imagine, three square meals a day ;-)

[Citation needed]

[(Score.5, Interestin]

A law was passed in the United States which addressed online gambling operations ("Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act" - UIGEA). As a result, the public gaming industry ceased accepting online wagers.

What actually happened is that they had to change the way they accepted online wagers. There's some gambling site (and I'm willing to admit this is a citation needed too, since I've forgotten the URL) that posts graphs of gambling transactions going back for a few years, including the coming into effect of the USG online gambling ban. There's a slight drop and flattening out of what's previously a linearly increasing course, and then it's business as usual. In other words UIGEA had little actual effect.

Not being a lawyer I can't say exactly how UIGEA caused this death.

The casinos moved overseas, the players switched to using money laundering-style payment channels. All it did was move the problem somewhere else where it's now much harder to track. So UIGEA should really have been called the Money Laundering Enabling Act.

(I don't disagree with his economic argument, but UIGEA hasn't done what he thinks it has).