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Spam Your Rights Online

Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge 203

Posted by timothy from the if-convicted-you-must-wear-this-moose-attractant dept.
spamfighter writes "Survey firm Ipsos-Reid has taken the interesting stance that spam to Canadians has been attenuated by 20% because of the federal privacy law PIPEDA which is so fearsome in nature that is scares off even the biggest- baddest spammers in other countries. CAUCE Canada has their doubts."
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Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge More

Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge

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  • Story of Deep Well (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:05PM (#11928849) Homepage
    While numbers can be deceiving, I do believe tougher law will prevent crimes.

    I remember reading a Chinese story about an emperor visiting a village with a very deep well. He asked one of the villagers if anyone had fallen into the well. The answer was no, because the well is so deep and everybody knows that, so no one has ever been careless enough to fall into it.

    And back to the reality, one of the games that I'm involved in has recently introduced a "crime in the city" feature, and many players have been attacked as a result. However, as soon as the first criminal was arrested and mourned about the harsh punishment of being caught (lost points, jail time and whatnot), crime rate drops almost instantly.

    Having said all these, sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.

    By the way, the easter egg that I mentioned here [slashdot.org] few weeks ago still has not been discovered...
    • The old russian model springs to mind, where certain kinds of criminals where rewarded with extended action-oriented vacations in beautiful Siberia. Canada has large expanses of very simular real estate.
      • lol

        Although it may appear to be harsh and cold here, atleast in the far north -- let me assure you that such things do not happen here.

        In my honest opinion, the laws are too relaxed in Canada, to the extent that murderers and rapists get off much easier than their U.S. Counterparts

    • Re:Story of Deep Well (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mattkime ( 8466 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:17PM (#11928925)

      While numbers can be deceiving, I do believe tougher law will prevent crimes.

      Case in point: The War on Drugs

      • Re:Story of Deep Well (Score:1, Interesting)

        by gad_zuki! ( 70830 )
        >Case in point: The War on Drugs

        Most people do/have done currently illegal drugs. Most people have not been spammers. Most people goto parties, get fucked up, buy a bag of weed, etc. Most people do not buy spam lists and try to sell me herbal viagra.

        The war on drugs analogy doesnt work as it essentially targets 99% of the population at one time or the other. Spammers on the other hand are a much, much smaller group and as such legislation has a better chance of controlling them.
        • The war on drugs analogy doesnt work as it essentially targets 99% of the population at one time or the other.
          While I don't mean to be a prick, I have to disagree with you on the issue of most people having done drugs. Out of my peers, none of us have done illegal drugs once. Now, I am in a religiously conservative area, but to say that most is flat wrong. It may be according to your world view, but for most I would say they haven't.

          However, I agree with you on the scope of the legislation. Since there is
          • ... nearly all my friends either take drugs, or have done so in the past. Nearly all my friends' parents take drugs, or have done so in the past, and nearly all my parents' friends take drugs or have done so in the past.


            I suppose this is what happens when you and your peer group were born in the early 1970s.

          • While I don't mean to be a prick, I have to disagree with you on the issue of most people having done drugs. Out of my peers, none of us have done illegal drugs once.

            Are you sure? It's not like everyone who tries an illegal drug tells everyone else about it. Especially if you are the bible thumper you sound like. (No offense intended. But you did mention living in "a religiously conservative area", and you seem convinced that only inner-city hoods do drugs, so I think I'm making a logical leap.)

            If

        • Re:Story of Deep Well (Score:3, Informative)

          by sfjoe ( 470510 )
          The war on drugs analogy doesnt work as it essentially targets 99% of the population at one time or the other.

          It's a bit more complicated than that. Study after study has shown that the most effective deterrent to crime is not tougher penalties but a higher likelihood of being caught. So many people do drugs, sex and gambling that it is nearly impossible to catch even a reasonably large percentage of the "criminals".
          It remains to be seen if spammers face a high likelihood of being caught.
        • "buy a bag of weed"

          I'm allergic to weed...

          *cries*
        • both with drugs and with spam the solution IS NOT tougher punisments for the 1% caught.

          the solution is: more people caught. you don't need tougher punishments- a month or two of jailtime would be more than enough - but you need to make the possibility of you getting caught very real.

          20 years in jail doesn't keep you from doing something when it's extremely improbable that you'll actually get caught and tried in court.

    • Re:Story of Deep Well (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Drishmung ( 458368 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:24PM (#11928953)
      sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders

      The law is tough, and becoming tougher, because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.

      Spammers (as a generalisation), do it for financial reward. Negative reward is applied in the form of laws against spam. However, the chance of being caught is so low, that this is no real disincentive. Thus, in order to make it not worthwhile to spam, we have to either

      1. Raise the probability of being caught and punished
      2. Apply higher penalties

      Eventually, a rational spammer will decide that penalty×prob_penalty_being_applied > profit, and will give up.

      Since prob_penalty_being_applied is currently so low, the tempation is to make penalty very high.

      But that has its own risks. Remember, you might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Draconian penalties usually result in offenders who 'shoot back'. A spammer facing 25 years as a guest of the authorities, might just be willing to take fairly extreme methods to avoid prosecution.

      • Eventually, a rational spammer will decide that penalty×prob_penalty_being_applied > profit, and will give up.

        This is a problem for which there are numerous possibilities for technological solutions. If they are ever put into practice, spamming will become unprofitable.

        One approach would be to require everyone who wants to send you an e-mail to obtain some kind of authorization to do so in some way that requires some kind of manual action that cannot be performed automatically.
        • The challenge response method doesn't scale well as it adds too much overhead to the email system.

          Also as a sales rep, I would never use it because I wouldn't want to make it any harder than it already is to contact me. I can guarantee that some customers won't bother replying to the response challenge and just move on to some other company that is easier to contact.

          Just imagine what happens if customer Bob sends me an email for a quote request on Friday Evening, goes home for the weekend and doesn't chec
          • Also as a sales rep, I would never use it because I wouldn't want to make it any harder than it already is to contact me. I can guarantee that some customers won't bother replying to the response challenge and just move on to some other company that is easier to contact.

            The authorization mechanism would be an integrated part of your e-mail account and would manage your whitelist/graylist/blacklist. Once approved, a mailer would stay approved until you changed their status. From addresses would be authen
            • I know how challenge response works.

              Now you want to encrypt everything and again add more overhead. Not only that how do you do any server side filtering with encrypted messages?

              And, if you wanted to receive mail from everyone, you could just configure "*" into your whitelist.

              Or I could just run spamassassin and not waste my time on challenge response.
      • One part of the arguement (increase penalties = reduce crime) that seems to get forgotten is that most criminals don't believe that they will get caught.

        Most often this comes from them believing that they are smarter than / have outsmarted those who would attempt to stop them from committing their criminal activity.

        The common wisdom (increase penalties = reduce crime) falls apart, because in the "bad guys" mind "I ain't gonna get caught, so the penalty is irrelevant."
    • You have recognized only the risk in the form of Law. You have recognized only this risk, outside of any consideration of reward.

      What if that well was the only place to get water. Do you think people would not go to it, or use it?

      Of course, when spam pays, the reward can outweigh the risks. Can you play that game with you laws? And have them to be considered fair?
    • Is that there would be far fewer car accidents if, instead of air bags, cars and a pointy spike mounted on the steering wheel.

      I think a strong factor is the degree to which the "danger" is immediate though. I'd expect that with spamming, similar to peer to peer copyright infringement and maybe drugs as another poster mentioned there is a strong tendancy for a "I'll never be the one who gets caught" mentality.

      The law will certainly deter some people but I think a lot of people can quite easily convince the
    • sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.

      We certainly know how to identify them. Almost everyone who commits a serious crime already had a list of offenses a mile long. We know all about these guys. We're just too pussy to get rid of them. And we suffer for it. We at least need to be shipping them far, far away, maybe to an Arctic island.

  • Canadians celebrated today (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:05PM (#11928850)
    As news reached their frozen ears that for the first time, someone somewhere was afraid of something Canadian. "Eh?" said one Canadian.

  • law and filters (Score:5, Informative)

    by dirvish ( 574948 ) <dirvish&foundnews,com> on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:08PM (#11928869) Homepage Journal
    They also contribute the decrease [foundnews.com] to an increased use of spam filters by individuals and businesses: "New privacy laws and the use of spam filters by individuals and Internet providers helped lower the amount of unsolicited e-mail to 49 per cent of all electronic mail, down from 68 per cent in 2003." So, there might be just as much spam being sent...Canadians just aren't seeing as much because they are using filters.

    • Re:law and filters (Score:4, Informative)

      by rs79 ( 71822 ) <hostmaster@open-rsc.org> on Sunday March 13, 2005 @08:00PM (#11929107) Homepage
      The "average" Jane and John Doe is not a great metric; many ISP's do a reasonable job of spam filtering. Try an unfiltered box and look at traffic patters for a year for an accurate measurement. Users perceptions are not a reliable indication.

      I'm in Canada and my filters are pretty simple. Spam was down a bit after xmas, but in the last two weeks it's about doubled. Again.

      I get more than I did a year ago.

      So, no, I would not by any stretch say spam is down. But I am getting much more efficient at deleteing it. Practice makes perfect and all that.

      Some of my email addresses are 20 years old now. I probably get more than my share.

    • Re:law and filters (Score:3, Informative)

      by kent_eh ( 543303 )
      attribute the decrease to an increased use of spam filters by individuals and businesses

      That's the answer I would offer as well.

      The major ISPs are offering spam filtering at the server, so the end user never sees 98% of it (unless they disable the filtering).

      My ISP is Shaw, and they have a (no extra fee) filter that users can configure from a web page. Either no filtering, identify spam and tag it,but allow download, or auto-delete the spam as it arrives.

      When it was first ofered, I ran with the "ta

    • Re:law and filters (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BrokenHalo ( 565198 )
      Canadians just aren't seeing as much because they are using filters.

      I guess you could probably say that for everybody. I'm not Canadian, so I'm not sure this statistic would apply, but 99.2% of the spam I get here in Australia originates from the US.

      Obviously it is not possible or practicable for me to "go after" a spammer in another country, and I'm sure they are perfectly aware of that, and count on it. In a frontierless world such as the internet, laws such as this are only effective if every nation has

      • In a frontierless world such as the internet, laws such as this are only effective if every nation has and enforces them.

        According to the 99.2% stat you show, if *one* country (the US, where most spam originates) were to go after spammers, it would have a huge effect. Instead, we've passed the Can-Spam act to legalize the crap. (...sigh...)

    • They're probably correct, I think there have been some changes in spam filtering technology since last year. I think my (Canadian) ISP essentially gave up on unfiltered email and switched all of their clients over to a filtered system so that before email hits your inbox it's already been filtered by the ISP wide (and mostly invisible) spam filter.

  • ... no, try again. (Score:5, Informative)

    by meisenst ( 104896 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:09PM (#11928876) Homepage
    Speaking solely as a Canadian citizen, I get more spam today than I ever have in the past. This has nothing to do with the propagation (or lack thereof) of any law, but more the fact that my email address (or one of my email addresses, many of which forward) has been out on the Internet in lists and such for years now.

    While the lists propagate, so will the spam. One of these days, whatever list(s) I am on may stop circulating, but I'm not holding my breath.
    • I'm also a Canadian, and I can say that I'm also getting more spam than ever. I don't know who they polled on this less spam front, but I'd sure love an email account there.

      Cheers,
      3cardtrick

    • Another Canadian chiming in.

      My experiences are the same, and I attribute it to the same problem of my email address being publically accessible for so long.

      That said, even if spam levels were to decrease by 20% over a given period of time, it'd be difficult to identify, let alone diagnose. One day I may receive 10 spam emails. The next, 200. A lot of my spam for one account seems to come from a small handful of sources, so one of them taking a day off from hammering my address would probably have a more n

    • Re:... no, try again. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mrbcs ( 737902 )
      Same email addy for 5 years.
      .ca domain.
      100 messages a day.

      5 real ones. 95 spam.

      P.S. Canadian privacy laws are a freakin joke. You can't find out the balance of my chequing account, but the Americans can find out anything they want if any of the companies I deal with are an American subsidiary. HA! Privacy... sure.

    • I have been getting more spam to my shaw.ca account, and yet far less in the spam folder of my gmail.com account (though a couple have pushed into the inbox). I use the gmail one to sign up for many more websites too, so I don't know.
    • Let's see here...

      Last May, my ISP address was harvested. So were many others I talk to (no wonder they added Yahoo's bulk filtering). 10 spam a day there now, from 0 before.

      Another address received very little spam for something like 5 years. It and another were hit by email viruses and a few months later the spam picked up. Now I've been forced to turn on SpamAssassin (which gets every one, mainly with IP and URL checks).

      My DNS contact addresses are routinely spidered. I change them every few months, an

  • Privacy is subjective (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:14PM (#11928907) Homepage Journal
    Please keep in mind that Canadian privacy laws are very different than those in both US and EU, so I recommend reding PrivacyInfo.ca [privacyinfo.ca] by Professor Michael Geist (University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law). Knowing the most important differences is essential to fully understand the issues in question so you will save a lot of time if you read about both Federal Privacy Legislation [privacyinfo.ca] and Provincial Privacy Legislation [privacyinfo.ca] first. The article linked in this story makes much less sense without appropriate background.

  • Ha ha ha ha... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Uhm, pardon, that is hillarious, eh?

    Spam will only go down once the majority of ISPs have deep packet scanning routers, so the crud won't propagate. Yes, I know, that is censorship, but it is inevitable.

  • Not a chance. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DaCool42 ( 525559 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:22PM (#11928948) Homepage
    I work in the IT field for a large Canadian company. The amount of spam we get is slowly but steady increasing. Currently somewhere around 98% of all the mail we get is "Junk" (spam, invalid recipients, improper smtp protocol, etc). Looking at our mail server graphs shows a definite upward trend in both overall "Junk" and confirmed spam.

  • Exchange Rates (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:24PM (#11928956)
    A free iPod in the US is actually $15.43 in Canada at the current exchange rate.

  • Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:25PM (#11928963)
    Considering that Canadians, like anybody else, can have e-mail addresses that don't end in .ca, there's no way for spammers to know that they're not spamming Canadians. If Canadian laws were having an impact on spam, it would seem that the rest of us would experience a decrease in spam as well.

    • Didn't you get the email?

      It was only sent to Canadians. It had a web link to opt out of all spam.

      Perhaps it got caught in your spam filter.

    • This whole thing was a troll.

      50% of my spam is from a canadian pharmacy who were gullible enough to buy an "opt-in" e-mail list with 5 million copies of my email address!

  • Filtering to allow only those e-mails which come from desired senders eliminates all spam. I would rather have that than legislation which requires my tax dollars to enforce. Let those who are ignorant pay for their ignorance in the form of spam deletion. The end-user solution is the best response to spammers.
  • I'm not ready to attribute it to PIPEDA, but my spam proportion has levelled off.

    For the last year I've consistently received about 81% spam. This is in contrast to the previous 4 years, which saw a continuous increase.

  • Canadian University blocked AOL (Score:5, Interesting)

    by adachan ( 543372 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:40PM (#11929026)
    I am an American living in Canada and I need to deal with some US ISPs. For example, my father uses AOL for email. I use Shaw -- I am not sure there actually is another cable service provider in Canada -- and when I first moved here I was unable to send or recieve email from or to my father.

    I later found out that some of my Japanese friends that use AOL accounts couldnt get my email and I couldnt get theirs.

    This has since changed, and I can now get email from them and they can recieve mine. I found this to be really annoying at the time, but I did get much less spam on my canadian email accounts than on my US accounts.

    A final note is that there is a difference between the amount of spam I get on University accounts in the US and Canada. I have 3 accounts at US univeristies and 1 in Canada. The accounts in the US get more than 50 spams a day. The Canadian one has never even recieved 1!!! This seems impressive, however, I think that someone is just stealing the outlook domain listings at US universities and selling them, this doesnt seem to be a problem yet here. Either that or they have the best spam filter I have ever seen. Cant figure it out.

  • Down for me (Score:3, Informative)

    by khendron ( 225184 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:40PM (#11929029) Homepage
    I Am Canadian, and I can report that my spam at work has decreased significantly. The amount of spam I received peaked at about 200 per day a couple months ago, and then over a period of about 4 weeks dropped to to less than 100 per day.

    I don't know why. It's not being blocked by our servers because the spam filter at work only tags spam, it doesn't block it.
    • For me it depends on the account. My old ISP would let through about 3/month. On average it would block 10-30 per day. I moved to sympatico and it dropped to 0 (so far). My Yahoo id two weeks ago was averaging 30+/day, it is now down to about 3/day. My Yahoo id is used by my kids for the 'registration' that everyone insists on. That way our normal email ids are not flooded (as much) by the obvious spams generated by those companies who sell the email addresses from registered software.

      Spam is a fact
      • A few months ago, Aliant(sympatico)had smtp blocking in and out, except to smtp1.ns.sympatico.ca (their smtp server). This made it impossible to run a mail server at home.

        Now they have just blocked outgoing smtp, so I've finally been able to run a mail server, but I need to relay email through their server for it to work. Not a bad comprimise.

    • Down for me, too. It used to be 30 per day, it's now more like 10 per day.

      Mind you, 10 per day is still way, way too high. It's double the amount of legitimate email I get.

      Like you, my email is tagged not blocked.

    • Spam at work??? Please send me your details so I can sell your company a proper mail server with Spam Assassin.
      • Read my post again. We have a spam filter, but it only tags the spams (for easy client-side filtering). It does not block them. We don't block the spam because the spam filter we use a product of our company. We need to see what is getting tagged as spam (or not getting tagged as spam), as a matter of professional interest.

  • Being a lowly federal civil servant (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:45PM (#11929043)
    I think it was last week or two weeks ago, I opened one of the many emails in my inbox at work, which was about the spam problem.

    Long story short, from what I read, I think that when spam reaches the point where it's impossible for the government to effectively use the current email infrastructure, someone somewhere is going to call in the Mounties, no doot aboot it, eh.

  • Like spammers know who they're targetting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Xugumad ( 39311 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:50PM (#11929065)
    I have an e-mail address that ends in .ac.uk (UK academic), and still most of my spam is for offers that only apply to the US (pills from Canadian pharmacies being the most popular at the moment, it seems). That, and a lot of offers of a degree, which I really wouldn't expect if these were targetted (nearly everyone with a .ac.uk address either has a degree, or is working on getting a real degree).

    As such, I find it very hard to believe they're avoiding spamming Canadians.
    • I am in Canada and I know that they are not avoiding us. My Yahoo two weeks ago was averaging 30 spams per day. My Sympatico id so fare is spam free, but, it is only a matter of time. We have the filters at work, but, they figured a way to bypass and a large number of people got porno spam... Not fun.

      The laws in Canada works only if the company sending this crap and/or the people buying the service reside in Canada. Otherwise the law is like a tape recording of a dog barking at the door... absolutely u
    • You're right. I always found it ironic that I was getting an offer for a "degree from the leading unaccredited university" to my old school email account (Wright State).
  • IANAE at international spam regulation laws, but if someone is just sending out random spam to hotmail and/or Yahoo! email addresses, are they really going to bother weeding out where each individual email owner lives and decide from there if they should spam it or not?

    I live in London, Ontario. I can tell you at least this: I use my hotmail address more often than I do my ISP provided one (Rogers High-Speed), and the Hotmail one seems to get nearly no spam despite being the most exposed of the two (barel

  • Spam has increased. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig.hogger@gmail ... m minus caffeine> on Sunday March 13, 2005 @07:54PM (#11929078) Journal
    Spam has definitely increased. Blocklist hits on a server have increased at least 20% during the last six months, and yet more spam makes it through the blocklists, which makes updating the manual blocklist an almost daily chore.

    A law is due soon, and given the number of zombies, it should make ISPs liable if they do not disconnect trojaned customers in due time.

    There is no excuse for letting a trojaned computer on the Internet, it is a major nuisance. Punitive disconnection ought to be a good way of clueing-in john Q. Bozo in properly running a computer.

    Vidéoétron is notoriously clueless when it comes to zombie, making it's networks one of the filthiest cesspools. By contrast, Stupidico blocked port 25 a long time ago, so almost no spam emanates from their network.

  • Running Several Servers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Exter-C ( 310390 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @08:02PM (#11929112) Homepage
    I run several servers with a few businesses etc hosting their email across the board I probably have 400 users give or take 20. In recent months the spam problem was getting worse and worse. I have had spamassassin and other software running on the system to mark the messages as spam but the over all problem wasnt resolved and it kept getting worse. I have since changed the way that our servers operate by using RBL firewalls across the board with several different RBLs including spamhaus, sorbs, spamcop and dsbl. Since taking that action the spam has dropped from just under a million emails marked as spam a month to around 34000. That is a huge drop in spam. I also log all connections that are refused because of RBLs so that I can see if there are any bad entries if anyone complains about failed email delivery. All in all the amount of emails being rejected has also been falling as the "spammers" and other "bulk email" providers that are listed on the RBLs and have users emails remove the emails from the lists they are using.

    Its not a perfect solution but it has reduced it to such an extent that the servers are now performing much better. Customers are more happy, spammers get screwed and everyone lives happily ever after.

  • if-convicted-you-must-wear-this-moose-attractant dept. Wow, Canada is a stranger place then I thought. Troubles with mooses up there?

  • Canadian Spam? (Score:3, Funny)

    by BeneathTheVeil ( 305107 ) on Sunday March 13, 2005 @09:10PM (#11929411) Journal
    Well, I certainly have seen less spam about hockey and Tim Hortons... so yeah, I guess there has been a decrease. :P

    Disclaimer: I am Canadian.

    Disclaimer's Disclaimer: I am not advocating that crappy beer.

  • How about let's say "reduced" or something that a normal human being would say?
  • Only about 5-10 a week make it to my inbox. Ignore the SpamAssassin filter that catches about 3,400 a week. Or the fact that this time last year it was only getting about 2,000 a week. Ipsos-Reid is infallible, I tell you!

  • Basis (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sheepdot ( 211478 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @12:09AM (#11930155) Journal
    I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I'd have to say there's a few good reasons for this.

    1. Canadians Internet users, on average, are probably a bit more tech-savvy than USians, meaning they have a lower response rate than Americans. (See NOTE, below)

    2. Canadians with email addresses don't always use .com, .net, .org. Instead they use .ca and I would guess the .de (Germans) folks get comparable amounts of spam when compared to the US for the same reason.

    3. Canadians probably don't report spam as often. Basically, they may receive the same amounts, but they aren't surveyed as often as USians on how much they hate spam.

    NOTE: I don't want to offend anyone by saying Canadians are smarter on average (esp. since I'm not Canadian myself!), but you have to keep in mind the sheer number of USians that have email addresses compared to those in Canada.

    In the US, everyone and their dog has an email address and webpage. In Canada, I find it hard to believe that Ma and Pa Smith have email addresses, or, if they do, at no higher a rate than Ma and Pa Smith in the US Midwest.

    Maybe "average" isn't as good a word as "median", too.
    • And what evidence do you have of point #1 since you don't live in Canada?
      • Well, I don't, which is why I said I didn't claim to be an expert.

        My basis is that much of Canada is rural. Perhaps moreso than in the US. Given the same network infrastructure, that would mean less of a percentage of people online.

        Doesn't mean it's true though. Canada might have everyone and their dog online as well. I just wouldn't guess that given what I know.
    • In the US, everyone and their dog has an email address and webpage. In Canada, I find it hard to believe that Ma and Pa Smith have email addresses, or, if they do, at no higher a rate than Ma and Pa Smith in the US Midwest.

      No offense, but I have no clue how your logic led you to the above statement.

      The poverty rate is much lower in Canada; hence, even our "poor people" can afford computers, unlike yours, which are kept utterly oppressed by deplorable poverty (I lived in DC for four months last summer, an
      • I'm not saying "poor people". I'm just making a guess that if the network infrastructure in Canada is at all similar to the US, then there are more "backwoodsy" areas like the Midwest, where broadband isn't available.

        Maybe I'm totally wrong, which is why I said I didn't claim to be an expert, it was just three educated guesses.

  • My Canadian spam levels (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Monday March 14, 2005 @01:01AM (#11930361)
    Your guess is as good as mine whether this data is worth anything, but daily mail volume for these stats is about 1,000 emails daily. The spam "level" is an index computed by our mail server.

    July, 2004....21.7
    Aug, 2004.....24.5
    Sept, 2004....23.2
    Oct, 2004.....27.1
    Nov, 2004.....24.2
    Dec, 2004.....29.6
    Jan, 2005.....26.1
    Feb, 2005.....29.6
  • For awhile, I noticed that SPAM in general seemed to be down on my various accounts. Then suddenly I've had a major surge of spam. The odd thing is that I'm getting it with on three different addresses from a particular sender.

    To: A LUG email, and one I've used to post on slashdot (obfuscated)
    CC: My primary email

    Obviously somebody's got my number, so it's probably one main spammer... I'd love to figure out who that is any how he/she got my addresses.
  • I thought they were just getting electricity up there.

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"Being against torture ought to be sort of a multipartisan thing." -- Karl Lehenbauer, as amended by Jeff Daiell, a Libertarian

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