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Comment by Femur | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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