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Hurricanes Affecting Spammers?
Ant writes "According to BusinessWeek Online's article, Lots of folks think the hurricane hits in Florida, the Sunshine (and Spam!) State have taken slowed the volume of spam." I've not noticed any decrease.
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and for the first time in months, no spam! Havent cleared it in days. Theres usually 100+ pieces in there, and now none! Not that this is evidence or anything, but interesting nonetheless...
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Working in the internet marketing industry (not spam) I can tell you that Boca Raton in particular has a reputation for being host to some extra-shady operations.
I've actually noticed an increase. They're getting spam through SpamAssassin, now.
Your ad here.
Apparently, Nigeria wasn't hit by any tornadoes since I'm still receiving several Nigerian letter scams emails daily. Sometimes I wish I'd get some sort of other spam, but no -- it's always Nigerian letter scams.
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
Well, hurricane Javier is somewhat near Cali right now. Maybe it'll take a fortunate turn northward? :-)
Just be sure when you blast the trench it leaves Talahassee on your side. Florida is really two states: The North is part of the southern US, and the South is a carribean nation. We call it Floribea.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
During Hurricane Frances, I was playing City of Heroes with a Super Group. One of our members lives down in Miami, and he was able to play through just about all of it.
He was worried that he'd get disconnected at some point, but we played for like 6 hrs straight on a Task Force that day, and I saw him online a couple of times throughout the hurricane days.
I guess he was lucky. I was surprised he was able to be online all of that time down there. We knew he was based in Miami since before the hurricanes, so it wasn't like he was trying to get attention.
Personally, I'm glad to be living on the upper-East coast. Our weather is mild, we have no earthquakes, mudslides, or raging fires to worry about (though my state is in the top 5 for largest forest coverage).
It would take A LOT for me to want to move down to Florida (though Spring Breaks are tempting).
If insurance companies have noticed that the cost of their spam filtering in their IT department is affected by Florida, then they should divert the costs of the filtering to premium rises in Florida alone, rather than dumping it across the board. Maybe then something would be done about it, when Florida insurance holders would notice raised premiums when they deal with their insurance to cover hurricane damage. And maybe it would actually affect their voting.
I would see this as no different from any of the other excuses that insurance companies use to raise premiums, like what kind of car you drive or the crime rate of where you live. Any company that has expenditures to cover spam filtering in their IT departments should charge florida a little extra.
I'm particularly attuned since I'm taking a probability class this semester.
There is a really excellent Web article titled Coincidences: Remarkable or Random? that I came across.
The thing that really caught my eye was where it shows mathematically that if you randomly select any twenty-three people from anywhere, there is a 50 percent probability that at least two of those people share the same birthdate. Nifty stuff.
The one quote from the Business Week regarding the wrath of God smiting Florida came from a post on NANAE, where the poster was blasted with one negative comment after another.
To take the position that God should somehow clear Florida by sending hurricanes is absurd. Literally millions of people with no connections to spam were affected.
Four people died in Blountstown, an 8 year old girl in Milton, and several others in Panama City Beach, and so far, no connection between the deceased and spamming.
If Mr. Helm wanted to write a piece regarding spam and Florida, he should of posted all the comments flaming the moron that had written the original post.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Back then, if you used the Internet, it was all a text-based interface. You'd log in to other machines by telnet. File transfers were by FTP. IRC was established in 1988 but not well known until the 1990's. (I ported IRC to HP/UX, sent the patches to the author, and didn't touch it again for over a decade because it looked addictive.) HTTP (the protocol of the web) wasn't invented until 1990.
I was a Computer Science student at California State University, Chico at the time. I think it was a great time to be studying Computer Science and networking.
By 1989, the Internet was already an international network spanning the US and all its Cold War allies (western Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.), with hundreds of thousands of users. The vast majority of users at the time were at large corporations, educational institutions and government/military sites. Direct access from residences was not yet common, though there were already some at the time. A lot of e-mail at the time was still transported in batch mode via UUCP over 1200-2400 baud phone modems, using the Internet only as a backbone along a multi-hop e-mail forwarding path.
The Internet has always had some decentralization by design - it was designed by the US military to be decentralized so that there was no center of the network for an enemy to attack. Even after it went into civilian use, that was enough for it to "stay up" through the 1989 quake even though some sites went down.
In 1989, San Francisco wasn't the center of the Internet or the quake - San Jose/Silicon Valley was. The World Series at Candlestick Park, the Bay Bridge collapse and the I-880 Cypress Freeway collapse that most of you saw on TV were all 80-100 miles from the epicenter, which was in the mountains spanning a 35-mile segment of the San Andreas fault between San Jose, Santa Cruz and Watsonville.
However, many phone switches in the region crashed when SF's phone switches went off-line. Most of the phone outages were just due to too many people picking up their phones to make phone calls at the same time after the quake, which happens after every quake.
Even so, many direct-connected Internet sites took as long as a few days to get back online. So as far as disasters go, it was comparable to Florida's hurricanes.
Anyway, so that's a bit of the history. It was a well-documented quake so there's a lot of history to look up if you want to. Some of our younger readers were too young to be aware of it at the time, or not even born yet. The 15th anniversary of the quake will be next month on October 17. Those of us who were in or near the area still remember where we were at 5:04PM, or shortly thereafter when we first heard about it. I was just far enough away in Chico that I didn't feel it. (My parents lived in San Jose at the time and I had been here for both of the 5.1/5.8 pre-shocks, so I was very interested.) But others in Chico either felt it (in tall buildings), saw chandeliers sway or saw swimming pools start sloshing. Many in the US learned about it quickly because of the World Series (baseball) - it was San Francisco vs Oakland and the game was just about to begin. Live news coverage had just begun and all the satellite uplinks were already reserved and live when the quake hit so the media couldn't have been more prepared to cover a major quake. So you'll find a lot of info about it out there.