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Study on the Effects of Spam on End Users
An anonymous reader writes "'About a third of people responded to a spam, seeking more information. And 7 percent actually bought a product or service.' Who are these people? Is this really what non-techies do with Spam? They can have my Spam if they want it :-)"
They're your friends, family and/or neighbors. In short, they are people who view a computer as merely a tool, not a hobby or profession. It would be interesting to run this every year and study trends. I expect that Joe & Mary Sixpack are becoming more aware of spam very quickly.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Am I reading the same report?
For this report, we collected original data from two sources. The first was a national telephone survey of 2,200 adults, including 1,380 Internet users that we conducted during June 2003. The second was a compilation of more than 4,000 first-person narratives about spam that were solicited since September 2002 by the Telecommunications Research & Action Center (TRAC), a national consumer group.
It's been a while since college statistics, but I thought that in general, once you got to a sample size of 400, your results weren't going to get much better...??
See, the problem with the 'approve' scheme (at least the simple, naive version that comes to mind) is that instead of being flooded with annoying messages you will get flooded with no-less-annoying and no-less-intrusive requests for approval/authorization, still creating a DOS-like situation due to the low SNR...
So that won't necessarily ease the problem.
You can not get around this fact: the average person is of average intelligence. Most of us know a lot about how to 'properly' use computers because this is either our hobby or job. But the average person has no idea. Our secretaries at work, for instance, haven't a clue about anything beyond click, type, drag.
Then there's just plain stupid people, who think that an anonymous advertisement in their email, with spelling mistakes, lots of exclamation marks, and garbage writing warrants a legitimate product or service. A fool and their money...
So you'll either have to require better training for all computer users, which probably won't happen. Or you'll have to revise the types of software that laypeople use to protect them from the world.
Don't confuse intelligence with knowledge.
/.'ers have had some mechanic laugh at them behind their back - "can you believe they agreed to pay an extra $200 to have their air filter replaced? They can't be very intelligent".
I'm sure a few very intelligent
Just because you know nothing about how much an airfilter costs doesn't mean you are stupid, and likewise with photoshop.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
The report is based on a randomized, national phone survey of 2,200 adults.
Now, I wonder why a survay carried out in this manner recorded an unusually high number of people responding to spam?
Maybe a truer responce would have been acheved if every time someone told them to fuck off and slammed the phone down they treated this as an 'I dont respond to spam' reply
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
This whole issue goes hand in hand with security, and software design. The onus is on the software developers.
Software that laypeople use should be designed to protect them from the real world (geeks use what they wish). And no, Microsoft software is not appropriate for the lay person: it requires frequent security updates, has too many complicated features that users misunderstand or misuse, has too many bells and whistles in Outlook etc. that introduce unnecessary security risks. There's no reason for script support in emails. I stip all my HTML mail to plaintext and have not missed a single word of meaning.
I have started looking at laypeople with Internet connections as very real risks to the digital world. If you consider this statement overblown, then consider the most serious network attacks to date. Almost all of them have used unsecured machines to launch attacks, or spam. And you must also realized that it is because of these unsecured hosts that plague most of the Internet that ISPs are forced to use increasingly restrictive filtering: they filter dangerous ports and drop mail from suspect IPs. Both of these are of huge detriment to all of our Internet experience.
You've never paid by the byte for your data transfer, then, have you? I imagine you've also never paid for your storage space or paid by the minute for your connection time. Any of these things make spam suck much worse. Also, it really sucks if you get so much spam in your mailbox that your provider starts bouncing legitimate messages. These conditions (among others) can cause unwanted email to become costly rather than merely annoying.
Liar. You hide it when posting on slashdot.
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[my dad]...also keeps asking if there's anything I can do to stop the semi-porn spam - and other than the usual precautions, the answer is still "not really".
Yes you can! Easily!
Get Mozilla. Use it as your e-mail client. It can either POP or IMAP. It has bayesian filtering. Just start training it, and your spam will be filtered. It doesn't save your bandwidth, but it does save your time.
I was talking with someone just yesterday evening. She is not a geek. She does use Mozilla for both browsing and e-mail as I recommended. She was raving about how she never gets popups, and hardly ever sees any spam. Her boyfriend gets tons of both. (Again a non-geek.) She keeps recommending that he get Mozilla. He thinks it is too much trouble to download it and run Setup.exe.
It is the easiest thing to do for a Windows user.
It is very sensible. Switch from a corporate-friendly e-mail client that can't filter, and a corporate-friendly browser to a user-friendly one of each. Mozilla's agenda is different. It is open-source, which is automatically user-oriented rather than vendor-oriented. Mozilla is never going to have the internal conflict whether they are being "too" harsh about filtering out vendor's potential advertising.
It just astounds me that so many Windows users complain about both pop-ups and about spam, when it is so amazingly easy to get rid of both in one fell swoop. Truly amazing.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Sure, at first the approval system would suffer from DOS like problems. But once 99.999% of spam never reaches the end user, there is less incentive to send it.
The problem will be if a large group of people still accept and read spam. The only way to stop spam will be if A) people do not buy the shit they sell or buy into the scams they offer, or B) spam is controlled by methods outside of the end users hand.
I still think this will not be a legislative solution. I really think that a large majority of mail hosts should implement white listing, at least for messages that are sent to multiple recipients. If multiple similar messages are received by a mail host from the same or similar mail host(s) then they should be blocked. If a user wishes to be part of a legitimate mail list then there should be a way to authorize that host to send messages. Sure, it will be a pain for some mail lists but utilities will pop up to make it easier for them to do the authorization dance.
If the top 5 mail hosts would participate, spammers would be obsolete.
Some people would argue that blocking unauthorized messages would prevent some people from receiving mail that they would like to receive. But companies that send mail to so many people obviously are being harmful to more people than they are providing a service to. (If you call con-ing people into buying useless crap a service, even to people who fall for it.)
-Jacob
This may work well for personal use, but it's an entirely seperate matter for business use. I run a small business with a heavy web presence. My business email address is on my web site, and it gets spammed constantly. Thankfully I've got a pretty good junk mail filter (OS X mail) that I check every week or so to make sure I didn't miss anything. I couldn't employ your suggested scheme, because I don't want to make it too difficult for potential clients to contact me. The more hoops I make them jump through, the less likely I am to get their money.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
When I assumed that "most" people were reasonably intelligent, I would get frustrated, angry and depressed at how stupid the "average" person could be. Now it no longer bothers me. Oh, of course individual acts of stupidity can be annoying, but the general stupidity of the masses is no longer unexpected, and therefore no longer frustrating.
"Feeling dumb" is a sign of intelligence. Actual dumb people usually feel they are smarter than they are. Limbaugh listeners, for instance, feel they are more well-informed about news than average. When tested, they prove to be less well-informed than average.
Note: I had originally typed "median", and replaced it with "mean". I knew that it was a Gaussian distribution and that the mean and median in this case were the same. But I also knew that, this being Slashdot, there would be a dozen people to "correct" me no matter which one I used.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb