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A Visual History of Spam

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-is-it-art? dept.

Cristiano writes "Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997 and graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man's malicious traffic."

4 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Single worst spam day by number of messages: Augus by FePe · · Score: 4, Informative
    Single worst spam day by number of messages: August 22, 2002. 67 pieces of spam.
    I normally get around 60 spam mails *per day*, so I guess he is rather lucky. The spam mails I receive are fortunately not full of images like the 41 images he got.
    --
    "Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
  2. RTFB by daytrip00 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Read the blog. This guy is one prolific programmer. He's the guy who ensures that all the old windows apps (like the ones from 10 years ago) keep running on the latest versions of windows. He has all sorts of stories about windows bugs and idiosyncracies and explains how they all came to be. It's a fascinating read and I have an RSS subscrption to his blog.

    Read this article which is all about his quest for windows and developer backwards compatiblity.

    He give this story about Sim City: It deallocated memory, and then used it right after deallocation. It was a bug that windows 95 allowed. So his code make a special check that you were running sim city and if you were, you could use memory right after you deallocated it. It's pretty amazing to see all the hoops that he and his team jump through. But he's a MSFT ledgend.

    PS. That blog entry I linked to sent Shockwaves through Microsoft. It's changed the new XML api design, and resulted in the backporting of Avalon to Windows XP.

  3. Re:hmm, how many gigs has he used to store spam? by leav · · Score: 1, Informative

    "Totals: 227.6MB of spam in roughly 19,000 messages. 61.8MB of viruses in roughly 3500 messages."

    uhm...
    nope...

    not gigs at all...

    think about it: let's assume 10k per spam (according to the graph) times 22,500 messages...

    thats 225 MB.. not too off than what he posted...

    Math Rules.... :)

    --
    I own a pump action golf ball cannon. I made it myself.
  4. Mailinator by R.Mo_Robert · · Score: 2, Informative

    Have you head of Mailinator?

    Basically, you can make up any e-mail address, say foobar2004@mailinator.com and go and check it later. All you have to do is type in your chosen name and check for mail. It's useful for websites you don't really trust (but not for those you might continually receive useful mail from). And, of course, it's incredibly unsuitable for any personal information, since anyone can check any "account" if they can guess its name. And e-mails only stay for a certain number of hours/days. But for quick signups that just require some sort of e-mail address, it works.

    --
    R.Mo