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U.S. World's Foremost Spam Nation In 2004
der Kopf writes "As reported by ZDNet, '42 percent of all spam sent this year came from the United States,' which makes the U.S. the unthreatened king of the 2004 spam hill. Number two on the list is South Korea (with 13.43%), while China can be found in third place (with 8.44%). The U.S. put out more spam this year than all the other countries in the top 12 combined." All depends who's counting, I guess.
We're good where it counts.
Do Not Eat iPod Shuffle
Finally, something to be proud of.
...with owned, unpatched Windows machines sitting directly on cable or DSL connections.
If Comcast and Verizon spent half as much on cracking down on their moron customers as they do on mailers begging me to use their Internet services, they'd have this problem under control in no time.
If most of the spam comes from the US, that means that any anti-spam legislation passed here could have a huge effect.
;-)
Of course, now we have to wait for Congress to actually do something about it.
-- Gone Crazy, Back Later
My understanding is that if you could close down the spamvertised sites, spam would largely be restricted to phishing attacks. If I didn't believe this, I probably wouldn't bother using spamcop!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What the fuck was that editorialil comment supposed to mean anyway?
Every time spam comes up as a topic here we get dozens of xenophobic rednecks proudly explaining that since they've "blocked all APNIC" they "don't get any spam, and who cares about communicating with them anyway". Even in the face of data like this, I'm sure they'll continue to lecture the rest of the world on how thay have to shut down "their" spammers or be cut off.
Personally, living in Hong Kong, about 1% of my spam is local, 2-5% Nigerian, the rest American.
Now an article with research backing it shows the US as the major culprit, and what does everyone do? Make excuses or jokes. What makes you think the Chinese don't have zombie machines? Or is it ok for the US to spam, but no one else?
And the fact of the matter is, aside from a few random Russian/Chinese emails (1 in 100), most of the spam I receive is offering goods and services in English, directed at the North American market. 'Where' the spam comes from doesn't really matter, what the spam is selling and where that thing is should.
You've managed to put your finger on the biggest problem in the Western social and economic system, that corps have the same rights than humans but none of the responsibility .
Though I don't think hitting the corporations financially as punishment really works. Large corporations will typically build in potential losses from economic punishments for misdeeds into their business model. A company may knowingly release a product they know to be unsafe, and simply put a portion of their profits aside for paying out of court settlements to victims.
In essense, this is akin to saying that it's alright for me to go around killing people without fear of jail if I can afford to pay the victim's families a large portion of money.
What I'd like to see is criminal charges brought on descision makers in corporations who knowingly use unsafe methods to produce a product that they know to be dangerous. In other words, a manager who makes the decision to save $0.02 on each product produced by using a less safe part won't be hedging those cost savings against the potential court costs from the families his company's product kills, he'll be hedging it against the very real possibility that he himself may face prison time for multiple murder charges.
We cannot give large corporations exemption from responsibility on a human level. We see corporations as faceless entities, but there are always human beings behind the scenes making decisions on how that corporation acts. If we start making those humans accountable for the actions of the company for whom they make decisions, I think we'd start seeing quite a bit more safety, envrionmental and social responsibility in the corporate world.
The Internet is generally stupid