The Blog From Hell

I just don’t get it.
Why exactly do spammers persist ? The tighter spam control becomes, the harder they work to get around them.

The only logical explanation is that there are enough people on the net stupid enough to give their credit card details to those who send spam that the crime does pay.
The tightening of anti-spam laws (in particular where spam is used for fraud) in countries like the U.S. seems to have had very little impact on it, except perhaps to increase the spam coming from highly connected developing countries like Brazil, while decreasing the amount coming from the U.S.
After all, knowing that the last person caught there got a ten year prison sentence must surely make the average Virginian a wee bit less inclined to use the temptation of a larger penis to try and trick people into revealing their credit card details.

And if e-mail spam wasn’t bad enough… I’m facing an ever larger task trying to keep the spam levels on this blog down. Discussion boards, blogs… damn near everything seems to have become a target.
I have to assume only an idiot would give his credit card details to a spammer…. so…
Can there really be that many idiots in the world ?

Let’s investigate this concept a bit further. I think the nature of spam actually reveals quite a bit about the nature of people. You’ve never seen a piece of spam for an online carshop have you ?
What do they (pretend to) offer ? Well there seems to be three basic varieties:

1. Selling sex: In this category falls pornspam, escort-agency spam etc. etc. Nothing of particular note here, advertisers through the ages have known that sex sells after all.
2. Selling to bad self-esteem: Here we find penis-enlargement, viagra, cialis, breast enlargers… actually it’s quite interesting that virtually everything in this category is targeted at male self-esteem issues. Things men suffer from, while there is very little attempt at targeting woman. This could mean that men with (particularly sexual) self-esteem issues are shyer about it, and perhaps more likely to be tempted by spam – because it offers… anonymity. Odd, everybody is always telling us how woman have body-image problems, created by impossible mass-media… yet if we look at the spam being created in this (the most prolific category by far) … we see the inverse – it appears that men are far more affected by body-image problems, particular where sexual performance is involved, and far more likely to seek an answer, while being in fact too shy to ask a doctor…
3. Selling to greed: 419, Cheap OEM software, Printer refill kits all of it try to get people to stop thinking rationally due to being blinded by the thought of quick cash. That is pretty much the same tactic as used by state lotteries and casino’s all over the world – except with a much smaller chance of actual success – to be exact, a zero chance. Interestingly, these spams are apparently targeted at a more highly educated and successfull part of the internet society than the other two categories. The 419 is specifically aimed at those with a several tens of thousands of dollars to risk. OEM software is being targeted particularly at SME business owners. This is an interesting thing, since I always perceived lotto’s and casino’s as targetting the least educated sections of society – but the spam suggests that they do not. Or perhaps they do – after all, you can gamble at a casino with only a small amount of money, a lotto ticket is only 2 bucks, the only difference between the richer and less rich gamblers are the amount of money thrown at the impossible dream. The spam community however, seem to be targeting right at the mid-level group. What it does show is that the casino income probably includes a lot from successful people in business. No doubt greed is a very common trait among such people, but it is surprising that successful businessmen could actually be so blinded by greed as to believe that you can ever beat the odds. Just like the casino, the spammers have them stacked against you – unlike the casino, there is almost nothing to reduce the level of the stacking to somewhere where at least some people win. Spammers operate outside the law, and as the 419’s have repeatedly proven, have no qualms about moving up to assault and kidnapping to ensure they take money, without ever having a risk of paying you.

Okay, so we can try to draw some interesting social trends and conclusions from looking at what comes in via spam, this is a helluva long way from making up for the damage and irritation spam causes… so that reopens the old question – how the hell will we get rid of it ?
Bill Gates said in 1998 that the spam problem would be solved (completely) by 2005… looks like he got that one wrong… in fact so wrong did he get it, that the single worst thing you can have from a spamprotection point of view remains a hotmail address. Hotmail addresses receive more spam than any other contact method on the internet (with yahoomail in a close second place), and the filtering misses almost all of it (gmail on the other hand, have a remarkably good filter that misses almost nothing).
So not only did Bill fail to solve the spam problem in time, his own mail system remains the most spam vulnerable place on the net… if the mighty microsoft cannot kill spam… who can ?
Well apparently google is making some serious progress… but only in their own realm. Ultimately, we need some sort of network-layer global solution. I’ll be damned if I know what that will be though. Time for the bright kids in the garages to step forward please.