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A Visual History of Spam
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."
Do you have a problem with programmers being able to spend a little time here and their on their own projects?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I would have much preferred to see the volume of email, represented in terms of the size of messages received, displayed on a nice looking bar graph, with viruses in the foreground, spam in the back. Maybe even show legit email as another row in front of the viruses. Or even just a line graph. As it is, the information is occluded by his presentation. He took some raw data, did very little to interpet it, and put it on his blog. The information could be interesting, but the presentation is very lacking.
OTOH, he could just be a man with low span suseptibility :)
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
How did he manage to keep track of this on a M$ box without catching a few of those viruses?
Beause contrary to the popular opinion on Slashdot, you actually have to open and run the attachment yourself in Outlook in order for it to do anything. None of the big e-mail viruses have been able to spread without active help from the user. I have been running Outlook for 6 years by now and never had any problems.
When men used to be men
Yes, he used a PERL script to generate the graph. Less than orthodox for an MS employee. His blog's 'not a .net blog' caption also hints at a certain cynicism being harboured.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
It seems like Raymond Chen is less than average in the amount of spam received
Umm.. so your the average? Have you ever thought that maybe you are on the high-end of the bell curve.
Raymond Chen is less then you in the amount of spam received, who knows maybe he is exactly the average.
Why don't you poll people and find out.
I would but I dodn't care.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Excellent idea. You go first.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Eh? Care to explain that statement? Microsoft didn't write the first spam, didn't create the open protocol that enables spam to be sent so easily, and doesn't run the biggest ISPs where spam is sent from, though its Hotmail users seem to be quite susceptible to receiving it. So how is Microsoft responsible for virtually all spam?
I don't much care for many of Microsoft's products but let's be a little more circumspect with the accusations we throw around.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
I think the graph isn't too helpful. Size vs time may be interesting to look at but it doesn't really say much. I think a more useful plot would be a frequency chart or a histogram or something like that.
I'm not dissing the work--just saying how it could have been better...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places