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I am a sys admin and programmer. In my free time tend to write a lot of financial analysis code for equity movement forecasting. So I started a blog about it.
Inadvertently I stumbled onto the fact that the stock market and associated terms is a relatively high popularity AdWord in Google, so the rare clicks that I got were fairly high value.

Since I am a sys admin and have to deal with blocking spam both on a personal level and also for our office network, I was seeing that there was a clear trend in spam - I think we could all see it - it was going up and up and up.
So I started a blog in order to discuss spam and ways to stop it, since apparently many people weren't familiar with what was available (especially since so many people actually buy from spam).
But I have to admit, that was only part of the motive - part of it was the curiosity on AdWord revenue from something that was going to be growing so much in popularity (probably the wrong word there).

I have seen some ad clicks on the spam blog go for as much as $10, and on the stock market blog they tend to top out at about $1.50.

Unfortunately, due to starting up my own company on the side, and increasing pressures at work - combined with the fact that there is only so much you can say about a subject, I stopped posting as much to the spam blog.
I also haven't posted to the financial blog in far too long as well, but more because I accidentally (retarded I know) deleted my stock database one bleary-eyed morning and I have yet to rebuild it largely out of laziness. (I had incentive for awhile since I was trading for a friend and making him money, but then stopped doing that so that I could lock in the gains and now have less incentive to care until I can trade more with my own funds)

I run a blog that talks about spam and related issues. When I pointed out Hellacious Riders in the past (they are the ones that are offering the large accounts), some readers of my site apparently tried to sign up and had issues with it and they feel that the site is a scam.

Since I don't believe they had money taken, perhaps it is personal info that is collected? Or perhaps it is just a way to generate traffic coming into their site? Or just a prank?

I don't know, I haven't tried to sign up myself.

I wrote about this over on my spam blog today.

While this is a reasonable idea on the surface, the reality is that spammers aren't necessarily spamming from their own computers. So if they aren't spamming from them, it doesn't matter if their power is out due to a hurricane.

Florida houses the people that are responsible for the most spam, but that is a legal thing (especially Boca Raton which has the most favorable bankruptcy laws for spammers - they get to keep physical assets such as their Porsches) - it doesn't necessarily mean that they send the spam themselves.

The spam is cheaper to send from elsewhere (cheaper largely in the legal sense of avoiding "local" prosecution) such as servers overseas (Brazil, Korea, and Russia - used to be China until they recently cracked down on it), or from zombied machines.

I have noticed no drop in spam, and I can't logically think why there would be one (although on the news they said there were millions without power - so perhaps that means there are zombied PCs taken offline that aren't spamming).

This is old news.

I don't live in the States anymore, so it is hard for me to speak from first hand experience as to what its current SMS state is - but in 1999 and 2000 I could send an e-mail to "phonenumber@phoneprovider.gateway.com" and it would see if that user had SMS capabilities on their service and if so would send it out to them.

I used it to send myself automated reminders and data via my computer - I also used it to harass my friends via e-mail.

Do these things still exist? - I forget the servers that were used, but it was something along the lines of "messaging.sprintpcs.com" or something, and then the phone number before the @.

If they do still exist, then it is just a matter of sending out your spam to every number in that range. Since you know fixed area codes of sorts (not entirely valid on cell phones, but there is still the concept that not every number is used), it limits the number space that you would have to move through.

For instance you know that "0000000000@whatever) is not valid, but "617###0045@whatever" is much more likely to be valid, assuming "###" is a proper series used by the provider in question.
(I can't used fixed examples since I am not as familiar with them now as I once was)

Even if they turned off the open side of it (meaning any e-mail sent to that), there is still the web access side - there was a web interface that would let subscribers send data via a web page to any enabled phone number - even on other platforms.

If you do a search, there are Perl modules and such out there to automate this as well.

You can even do it via AIM/iChat.

I have talked about it to some extent on my spam blog in the past - but I don't want to talk too in depth about it and then make it that much easier for someone that may have not had that idea before.

Many people use spamassassin on unix boxes, or if they have Exchange they use SA on a unix gateway between the net and the Exchange system.
But if you are a smaller shop and don't have the resources for that, then you can run sa right on Exchange.
Here is a write up on how to do it (that particular write up is for Exchange 2003 and SA 3.0, but it will work for SA 2.x as well, and for Exchange 2000 - or any combination thereof - but it won't work on Exchange 5.5 that I know of).