Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
From the blurb:
I've not noticed any decrease.
From the article:
But daily results posted by MessageLabs, Earthlink (ELNK), and Symantec (SYMC) showed little correlation.
And neither has anyone else. It was only a single institution that claimed their weekly spam traffic was down 100 million messages. The article mentions that two top 10 spammers remained in the top 10 even during the storms. They even (hopefully) jokingly claim it was a heroic effort.
"Lots of folks think the hurricane hits in Florida, the Sunshine (and Spam!) State have taken slowed the volume of spam."
Lots of folks think there are black helicopters poisoning the citizens of our country too, but that doesn't make it the slightest bit true.
According to my Spam Stats (Coral Link) the level of spam going through my server is relatively steady.
If they think hurricanes in Florida did a decent job of taking out some spammers, they should wait 'til the next 6.0M+ earthquake hits Silicon Valley...
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
No, silly, spam is situated in California... The porn sites people sign up for are situated in Florida... Porn spam is down, overall spam is not.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
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.
At least I'm still get personal emails from high ranking democrats, why just today John Kerry himself sent me one.
Just as Microsoft learned when they had a DDoS against their DNSs and subsequently went to Akamai, the spammers will learn from this. After all, email is their livelyhood.
Trolling is a art,
It's nature's way of making sure that the Nov. 2 elections won't be screwed up by that state. If everybody is evacuated, there won't be anybody left to vote.
If it's true, then let's not waste another moment -- blast a trench and cut the whole state off from the country while we have the chance! It'll solve a bunch of other problems in November too....
I've actually noticed an increase. They're getting spam through SpamAssassin, now.
Your ad here.
Solution to anything(Political/Economical/etc..) is to wipe out Florida.
Just because you happened to receive less spam this month than you did last month, and at the same time, hurricanes happen to be slamming Florida, does not necessarily mean hurricanes are slowing spammers down. Nor does it mean that all--or even most--spammers are located in Florida.
Sometimes luck is just luck. There is such a thing as coincidence, in spite of what the religious nuts may try to tell you.
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
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).
I live in Indiana, but the company I develop for (and where they keep are mail server) is in Pensacola. There is apparently no power (or no server? who knows?) down there today, so I have received ZERO spams.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
A spokesperson for Hormel Foods reports that there has been no decrease in spam either ... however, there has been an increased interest in Spam Gifts and also in the Spam Museum.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
God promised you that he would never flood your ass out to sea and drown you. He never promised that he wouldn't send a category 4 hurricane after those who steal others' bandwidth. Be warned cyber sinners the end is fucking nigh!!!
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Hurricanes are living proof that God hates spammers and wants us to be happy.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Funny, my wife's theory is that God is telling Florida that they need to learn how to count. Doesn't matter for who, just learn.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
That my penis was finally big enough... They do stop sending you penis enlargement emails once it is big enough right??
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.
Date: Thu, 16 SEP 2004 15:44:20 -0800 (PST)
From: ezeani madu
To: ezeanimadu@yahoo.com
Subject: ASSISTANCE NEEDED
From: Madu Nominees Carbez.
1120 Louisiana Blvd
Louisana-America.
Dear Sir,
I do not mean to embarras you by this proposal, but to confide to you a very sensitive issue, of a very pathetic situation, and also to seek your utmost assistance for the issue I am about to explain to you.
My name is Ezeani Madu Carbez, and I am the principle consultant of the above mentioned law firm here in Louisana-America.
You see!, one of my clients, and ofcourse my most
valued client by name Jonnez Hommer just called my presence to confide a very sensitive situation to me. My client happeneds to be the chief security officer {CSO} of clearing house 'Diamond Dispatch'.
My client, Jonnez is presently being kept away from the clearing house by IVAN 15 inches of rain and surges of up to 16 feet, 150mph winds and IVAN.
A first class information has revealed that there is a shipment of diamonds washed away in a armoured car into the nearby lake before It could be deposited with the clearing house here in in Louisana-America before it was washed awaty.
According to him, the shipment contains the DIAMOND sum of US$35,000,000 [Thirty Five Million Dollars American] which the clearning house does not know about yet, as the content was declared as family jewelries and security documents.
My client needs finanical assistence in the recovery of the 35,000,000 [Thirty Five Million Dollars American], please send me details of your bank account for funds to be collected and for the 35,000,000 [Forty Five Million Dollars American] to be deposited through the assistencies to disperse the money from teh sales of the DIAMONDS.
My client has also resolved to reward you hansomely with 5% of the total amount on the sucessful conclussion of the DIAMOND recovery.
I shall also be 100% available to provide you with all the necessary assistance and guidelines you may require on the course of this assistence.
I have just entrusted the details of this shipment and the fate of this helpless diamonds into your conscience for safe keeping. I also hope to have offerred you a great opportunity to make yourself some good money, I believe I have.
Should the above opertaion appeal to you therefore,I hereby urge you to mail me your response immediately for further details and immediate commencement of this receovery.
You will also be doing us a lot of good to guide
this information with immense confidentiality, should this receovery not appeal to you.
Hoping to hear from you soon on this issue.
Regards,
Ezeani Madu Cardez. {ESQ}
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
Nothin' like "takin' the wind out of their sails" or sales...
I hear there are people on the east coast saying the same thing, that the damage to Fla is to rectify the theft of votes.
But, if Ivan the Terrible hit/s Louisiana and turned it to LOOuisiana, would that mean this is to wipe out voodoo or something?
Might be interesting if Louisiana and Florida were adjacents states. Imagine combining Voodoo and Spam...
VooDam
When that shit hits your inbox...
'VOODAMN!"
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I must agree. I barely saw any SPAM last week. However, I think that may have to do with my losing power for 128 straight hours.
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).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
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.