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Junkie Loves His Spam
VicPylon writes "Here is the reason we have to spend time and money on spam filters. This character actually responds to and buys from spam. I wonder if he is aware that he is supporting digital pollution?" I guess this proves that there really is something for everyone online.
This is why I'm not completly against Spam, but I wish they would clearly mark it so those who don't want it won't get it and this guy will.
People buy crap sold by infomercials.
You can sell anything to almost anybody.
An idiot is born everyday.
This guy's just as happy as if he had a brain, isn't he?
"I planned within my means and got a fixed rate mortgage, so where's MY bailout?" -cafepress
I wonder if he realizes that he is making life harder for everyone else. Most people that I talk to despise spam. Like the artical said, it wouldn't survive unless someone paid money for it. He might be getting enjoyment form it but he is causing other people pain.
If the guy wants to buy from spammers, let him. We have to fight spam from another angle, not by supressing people's rights to do stupid things.
How does a guy earning $40k per year have a 2 bedroom apartment in Midtown Manhattan?
_45_ year old, _smoking_, _grandfathers_ with more discretionary income than sence.
Will make MILLIONS, boys! MILLIONS!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
This guy likes to save money, and he reads his unsolicited email and then selectively buys from it. SO FUCKING WHAT? I like looking for used cds and books on amazon and for bargins on ebay. It's not like this guy is a hacker or a child pornographer or something. Why don't you people get a job and leave honest, hard working people be!
Right, but what was their n value? Where did they conduct the survey? Did they include a variable mix of people? Were their surveys limited to a particular geographic region or cultural group?
I can't seem to find the survey on MailShell...anybody having better luck? I did a domain search through Google but no luck.
Not challenging the accuracy of the survey outright, but it would certainly help to have a link.
Then again how was that survey sent out, by spam? If so they are already talking to a smaller set of people (the first 80% threw it out, so that number could really be 8% of 20% or 1.6%.
Mr. Soto used to haunt rummage sales, thrift shops and flea markets, but he hurt his back in the mid-1990s, so he turned to the Internet.
... These kinds of activities are like crack cocain to certain types of buyers. My aunt used to make crafts that she would sell at the 4H fairs and craft festivals, and she would take me an my cousins to flea markets and rummage sales.
That sentence, quoted from the article, describes his entire interest in spam. There are 10 types of people who shop... those who go to flea markets, and those who don't.
Flea markets, rummage sales, garage sales, yard sales, thrift stores, salvation army stores, craft festivals, 4H fairs, county fairs, state fairs
For those of you who aren't connected, it's a way of life for some people.
And this guy, because he hurt his back, is merely doing the online version....
He does. It is mentioned in the article.
His mortgage rate is 0%. (He doesn't have one.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I'll make one exception: if they add the "ADV: " to the subject line, then I may give them the benefit of the doubt.
And if most everyone in the world bought Windows licenses, Microsoft wouldn't need to charge as much for them.....oh wait....everyone DOES buy them, and MS wants to MAKE MONEY.
I hear all about connections between SPAM and organized crime. However, I don't see how SPAM is much different from other forms of information pollution, e.g., ads. For cleaning up email, there's Bayesian filtering. For the web, there's pop-up blockers. For TV, there's Tivo. And in each case the info-polluters have their counter measures.
:w
If so much spam actually finds buyers, why don't any of these people honor opt-outs?
And if there's really people like Mr. Soto, what's the problem with actually having opt-in?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
And what business do you know aims to break even? People go into business to make money, as is certainly the case with spammers. If they get more people to buy, they will spam more.
thanks for chiming in. perhaps he is just an idiot, perhaps he has a disorder, perhaps he has a disorder AND is an idiot, perhaps neither ... well, point is, one can't know this easily, but the question is worthy.
facetiousness aside, a lot of people getting willingly nailed by nigerian scams, penis enlargement pitches, and so may have a variety of things going on that dismissal as an idiot does not address. if we want to reduce the behavior and maybe do a little good for the victim, a harder look is often beneficial, and i mean in our day-to-day lives. that jerk brother-in-law might suffer from depression (which causes anxiety, of a flavor that's like being sawn in half), that tardy employee might be an alcoholic, etc. the point is not to give everyone an excuse, but to target the response to the problem and maybe do some good.
although (ahem) i am enjoying some of the humor here, i hope this guy makes some progress beyond "idiot". granted there are genuine idiots out there (if it's innate do we blame the same as if it is a choice?). i don't mean to medicalize everything, but the ignorance of the "normals" is greater than we realize.
Uh, /. is a big endeavor, taking time and money from the site's proprietors. It's free to you. I'd quit complaining about what they have to do to fund your entertainment. Really.
In the past, Mr. Soto says he has sent out spam himself, but he doesn't any more for fear of the increasing multitude of federal and state spam regulations now on the books.
The problem here is he doesn't comprehend and/or care that spam hurts consumers. This isn't just a hobby for him, it was a part-time business. People shouldn't dismiss him as some eccentric old man, there's no ambiguity here: he was previously an unlawful spammer and he encourages unlawful spammers. He is the problem.
Short of making it illegal to buy from unlawful spammers or public humiliation (I'm sure he will get plenty, now), I don't know of a way to get buyers to stop.
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
We complain about the quality of our television programs ("I'm a TV Star, Get Me Out Of Here!", "Joe Millionaire", etc.), but they stay on the air because Joe Denomenator watches them. He doesn't watch "Babylon 5" or anything that makes him think. (A producer of Andromeda is reported to have left the show because the network wanted less story line and more action. It was "too hard" for Joe Denomenator to follow multi-show stories. Andromeda has been a mashed-potato show ever since.)
Other mass media has followed. In the checkout line we get tabloids shouting "Lose ten pounds in a week without getting off your sorry ass", and "Have better sex with whomever it is you are banging this week". The venerable TV Guide has become TV Gossip instead of a programming guide.
Big box stores filled with cheap imports smother smaller, local stores until they go out of business, leaving nothing but cheap imports available. Joe Denomenator doesn't want to pay $20 for a radio that will last for years, he wants to pay $10 for one that he'll have to replace in a month, because it is too much effort to keep track of the one he has for more than a month anyway.
Why would anyone think that the Internet would be different, after using it became a "right" for Joe Denomenator?
I didn't think you could live in Manhattan on 40k, let alone have money left over for Spam offers.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
... of something a computer science professor once told me. It went something like, "You can write the best code in the world; design the best user interface and implement the strictest error catching, but you still can't keep the end user from being stupid."
user@host:/usr/bin$ whatis
java: nothing appropriate.
I have to say it's disturbing how accepting this culture is of the idea that rape is an inevitable feature of prisons.
I mean seriously now, we pay the guards to do what exactly? They can strip search an entire cell block in 30 minutes flat but they can't stop the inmates from raping one another. Puhlease! It's added value punishment.
It just disgusts me that people feel this is acceptable enough that jokes are made daily about it.
God I want to move to Madrid.
Yeah thats really funny when people get raped. Maybe you should be a comedian.
From the article: He's bought fancy knives, leather jackets, stuffed animals, party supplies and software, all via spam, and then created Web sites to sell the items at a profit -- a skill he learned from another piece of spam.
It doesn't say that he HAS sold them at a profit. Just that such was the intent.
Actually, this was a huge issue with the "Home Shopping Network" type shows on cable and satellite TV, long before Internet "spam" existed.
I recall reading stories of people who had homes filled from floor to ceiling with boxes, almost all still unopened, ordered from these TV networks. In fact, folks with this disorder probably account for a surprisingly large portion of these station's sales of goods - so it's little wonder the media hasn't done more to make people aware of it.
On the other hand, I've done my share of flea market sales, and I can assure you that the vast majority of these "bargain hunter" shoppers simply get a thrill out of finding a "deal" on items. It's almost a sport or hobby for them. Typically, they make decent money, or they're retired with plenty of income (investments, pensions, etc.), and the amount they spend on needless shopping doesn't put that much of a dent in their total income.
Just like some folks like to spend $50 or so at the bar on a weekend, or spend it on dinner and movie for entertainment value - these people like to blow a little cash on their flea market or online bargain hunts.
That's just an attempt to destroy your bayesian filter. See, the spammer knows it will still get tagged as spam but now "justice, remarked, scarecrow, sigh, dangerous, ..." are slighly spammy words in your database. If you get a lot of spam then your database will get a very large number of these incorrectly spammy words. Mine is 50MB, and when I was using two word bayesian instead of one-word, it was 200MB.
Now the next time someone sends you an email about scarecrows (which I guess doesn't happen much) your spam filter goes: oh, I know that word, it's a spammy word! I'm sure the spammers know that any spam filter that starts misclassifying legit mail very quickly gets trashed.
So you are able to judge my life and judgement knowing exactly one fact about me? Is it sound judgment for just anyone to have a child at 20? No, it isn't. Things have turned out fine for me. My son is a great kid. He's better behaved and makes better grades than most of his peers who's parents are older. While having a child at 19 may not be a great idea for most, I wouldn't change a thing. And unsound judgement at 19 does not mean I have bad judgement for the rest of my life. I believe the poster failed to recognize that point.
I've seen some pages that appear to be regular text, but are written by some godawful series of obfuscating javascript functions... If you're good enough you could decode it, but it's hard. Kinda a waste of time... if I wanted your design, I could use MSIE's "save html complete" and get an approximate code snapshot... or just code from scratch, it's not that hard.
Precisely. "Encrypted HTML" is nonsense of the first order -- if a browser can receive, understand, and display a page, it must have access to the source in a form it can parse, which means *you* can parse it, too.
IANAL, but isn't this guy pretty obviously engaging in deceptive marketing?
From the article : Mr. Soto routinely comes home to some 150 e-mail pitches, and he loves getting them all.
It's been said before : "Spam is not a problem, just hit delete, it takes less than a second".
In this case, the guy takes the time to read the messages. Ok, it means he can handle more spams than most internet users. But everyone has a limit. And every mailbox has a limit. How would he react if he had 1500 emails a day ? 15000 ?
Spammers have no limits, they send billions of messages : This article says AOL blocked 500 billion messages in 2003 and it's increasing.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
That's like saying your against junk *snail* mail.
How can people still not get it?
When you recieve an ad via snail-mail, the sender has paid the postage. He's paid for the paper it's printed on. When you receive spam, the spammer has stolen your bandwidth, your ISP's bandwidth, your ISP's storage, administrative costs, etc. And your ISP doesn't get to bill the spammer. The ISP passes the costs on to you. When the ISP has to upgrade add more bandwidth to handle the spam, who do you think pays for that? Spammers? What about when the ISP adds on three more mail servers or another four-drive SCSI RAID array to deal with the spam? Do you think the penis enlarger guys are going to chip in to pay the costs?
Who the hell moderated the parent post as insightful? Are they giving moderator points out at crack houses?