Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail | Hacker News Reader

Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

32 pointstokenadult32 comments

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.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy

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.

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.

No. He implied that if the boy broke enough windows the town will put up CCTV cameras and no windows will be broken further.

Still the same fallacy. We could put up the same CCTV cameras and get at least as good an outcome if the problem weren't as bad to begin with.

Hmmm... maybe - but I don't think so.

Firstly, the cost to each player is extremely small - so their incentive to "do something about it" is small. If a person receives only one email a year nothing will be done.

But if he receives his life's spam in a year he will do something about it.

Also note that most countries will not change their laws for a "small" problem. But if a problem is perceived to be large enough the law will be changed.

The improved sales figures at HP and Dell due to spam are representative of the broken window fallacy. Those numbers still look good on the GDP charts, even though they're essentially destructive.

It's not so simple, there might just not be a workable solution. With email, you want to allow strangers to send you mail (there must be a way to initialize first contact). So it is not trivial to lock out the spammers.

Your accounts rarely have spam thanks to the effort of many people you'll never meet (and lots of CPU cycles at your email provider).

It's the law of big numbers. Each day I spend maybe 1-2 minutes dealing with my spam. Multiply that by millions of people each day and you get massive business (and personal) time losses which equates to lost productivity/money.

What law of big numbers are you referring to?

After 10 minutes of searching on Wikipedia, i could find no reference to it even though I have heard of the law many times before.

Essentially the law of big numbers states that "A very large number multiplied by a small number is still a large number"

As the poster indicated, even a few minutes of daily span cleanup multiplied by millions of people equates to quite a bit of time.

It's large, not big :-) and it has a different meaning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

Also, spam encourages or requires other illegal activities -- money laundering, fraud, violation of health standards, piracy, identity theft. And the profits are likely to be fed into other questionable businesses.

I still occasionally find false positives in my spambox. I would think that if you don't check for those, the cost of spam would be much higher, since the cost of each missed email >> the cost of each piece of spam not read.

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?

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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

Junkmail is not subsidized by the USPS. Why would you think it is?

"Subsidize" was perhaps not the right word. The USPS has become primarily a junk mail delivery service:

http://www.newser.com/story/21936/usps-defends-its-life-bloo...

I understand that cycles can be stolen easily, but somehow I think cash might be a tipping point. The reason that spam works is that they only need a 0.00(ridiculous)1% response rate to make money. The risk of getting caught stealing versus the reward of what they'd make sending spam would probably get way out of balance if cash was required to achieve that response rate.

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.

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 :-)

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.)

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?

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com