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Spam Capital of the World
ermita2 writes "The South Florida Sun-Sentinel published this weekend a story about how South Florida is home to more spammers than any other place in the world according to Spamhaus. The reason for that seems to be Florida's long history and friendliness with dirty business from real estate speculation to the penny stock scammers. Among the interesting tidbits is anecdotal evidence that the amount of spam worldwide fell for a while after last year's hurricanes in Florida."
=>burning of fossile fuels(C+2O=CO2)
=>global warming
=>more hurricanes in Florida
=>less spammers
=>less spam
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
All the building codes, regulations, and sundry laws seem to favor corporations above everything else. Its one of those places you'll find scammers, shady SEO consultants and search engines, and yes... spammers.
Newsfollow.com
So, we do have some control over these people?
Why do we voters tolerate these businesses that bring nothing to the economy except for to the few only at the expense of the unwilling many and their time? Like telemarketers used to be such a PITA(got much less since the National Do-Not-Call lists), we should follow suit and push laws that shut down these people if they do it within the US.
If they want to yell Freedom of Speech, let them build a website I may or may not choose to go.
If you ever get the chance, see The Cocoanuts, starring the Marx brothers. Its backdrop is the great Florida land boom/swindle of the 1920s, which attracted con men and crooks from across the nation. Now their great-grandchildren are spamming us.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I wrote this last year in my 'blog:
/been an AC lurker since 2000. Maybe I should get an account :)
It's not everyday that you get a phone call from a sleazy spammer. I was just filling out some forms and this random guy (apparently) from Miami, Florida calls me up. He asked about my BotBlock service, or rather how to override it. Turns out he wants to pay me "any amount you want" to make a software that can bypass the image-verification (CAPTCHA) used by TicketMaster. He told me his "competition" was overtaking him and he was willing to pay me $5,000 to make such an application. Best of all, if I was feeling lonely, he could send me a hot woman any time of the day. I politely told him, "I'm sorry Sir but I think I'll have to hang up now. Please do not call again."
The world of mafia and money launderers of the yester years used to be a world of machismo, bravado, and to a certain extent glamour. While the neighborhood mobster is mostly a thing of the past, street-corner spammers are dime a dozen and each is trying every under-handed trick to oust the other. There is nothing smooth or sauve about trying to peddle cheap sexual aids or promote low-budget vacations to islands that don't exist. I think even the spammers themselves will agree that they are almost the scum of the planet, slightly above child molestors and rapists.
Tonight I had this guy asking me if I could write a ground-breaking software (image recognition is not cakewalk) so he can hoarde tickets illegally and spam mailboxes around the world with filth. Of course I said NO! I will never EVER on any conditions do anything to promote spam. Hell I wrote BotBlock to prevent it! Come to think of it, the genius asked me how to bypass BotBlock! I wanted to say, "What the hell do you think I am??? As dumb as you???" But then, last thing I want to do is piss off a spammer who will only enjoy harassing me. So I just acted polite and hung up.
I have a decent job and a bright career to look foward to so even the slightest dealings with these tarts will taint me forever. But what about the recently laid off, newly-married programmer who has bills, loans, and rent to pay? That's the guy to watch out for. I think the blame lies not only with these slimy spammers but also with smart programmers without jobs. It's no wonder so many hackers (well crackers) are from Russia, where the minds are young and bright but their future is bleak and dark. I'm pretty certain that the spammers are already working in tandem with programmers from all over the world but I wonder if there's anything anyone can do to stop them. Well other than making better blocking and filtering software. I think I'll stick to that for now.
Economics problem - spam is profitable as long as 0.01% of the spammed masses buy the pills. As long as there are just a few idiots buying into the crap, we all get spammed.
Or maybe it's just stupid wanna-be spammers who think that? So one spammer spams the world for a few weeks, doesn't make anything, and moves on. Then another spammer thinks ``wow, this is a great business model'', and spams the world for a few weeks, doesn't make anything, and moves on. And so the cycle repeats.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Well, Florida does seem to harbor scammers of almost every kind, but removing all computers from Florida won't even begin to stem the tide of spam in your e-mail inbox.
/. to identify an email/content as spam, and given enough karma on it, all other subscribers can add it to their filtering lists
Because of the very design (or lack of) of the Internet, it is not possible to locate and eliminate the source of spam with anything near 100% efficacy.
The only answer is not a single answer, but many small efforts to both block, and eliminate spam. There are currently laws to prosecute spammers, but the governments of the world are more or less impotent when it comes to catching and stopping spammers. Like any good scammer, they are always looking for loopholes and workarounds for anything that is put in their way.
Only education and a concerted global community effort will stop them. They are obviously making money or they wouldn't bother to send out that spam. Really, they don't send it just to irritate you or I, they send it because there are smucks in the world that click on the links and hand over cash for whatever is being sold.
The real way to stop SPAM is by using an approach that includes everything we know or will know about stopping it:
-Educating users to press delete first
-Hardened mail servers
-OSS based instant notification to the global community of new spam identifiers
-OSS based listing of spam identifiers, with something like
-Actual use of white and black lists by default on e-mail clients
-many many more mail servers scanning emails, even small modem sized proxies doing it for home users
and the list goes on. Until we are furiously implementing all methods instead of looking for one killer app to get rid of spam, it will exist.
Just 2 cents worth
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I don't think that the problem is really people buying spam-advertised products. In the last year, I have received about 30,000 spam messages.
Of these, I would estimate 80% are in a language other than English, so I can't buy anything from them (and who knows what they're even about). That leaves 6,000 messages.
About 75% of these don't have a product that I could actually purchase. Viagara e-mails with no URLs and that sort of thing (I have no idea why these message are even sent out in the first place).
That leaves about 1500 messages that I could actually buy things from if I wanted to, which I don't. If you figure that some incredibly small percentage of people might actually be ignorant enough to do so, that's not very many purchases.
But the important thing is that it doesn't matter! The cost to send out these spam messages is zero. Every ISP and IAP is paying for it instead. Every user that has to sort through spam messages instead of working or doing anything else is paying for it. You get the idea.
So I don't think that user education is the key to defeating spam. The key is to make sending spam messages difficult through elimination of unauthenticated SMTP servers (even ones that aren't open relays) and infected Windows hosts. In addition, spam should be refused rather than accepted and filtered (although this creates problems with false positives).
Having been through, and to, Florida enough times (dozens) that I now refuse to go back, I've got more knowledge of Florida than I want. I lived in Louisiana for years, so I know about Mississippi and Alabama, too. Though my despite of Florida is mainly for its eastern and southeastern swamps. The Gulf coast seems to have redeeming qualities, without the depths of the Atlantic alligator pits, and the north-central is just typically redneck. Of course, those Floridian depths are populated exactly by people who'd rather live in Florida than in New Jersey - so they moved south.
--
make install -not war
From your comment: "In South Florida, only Broward, Miami/Dade and Palm Beach counties voted Democrat and Kerry lead Bush by only 6% of the votes in Miami/Dade."
:-)
:-)
From the article in the story (TFA): "Together, Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties are home to more spammers than any country on Earth. "
(my emphasis)
Ooops
Correlation isn't necessarily correlation, but I found it rather funny that they were the same counties.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
And it's governor another Bush, what a great american family...
I'll be sure to point you back to this post when Hillary Clinton runs for President, unless frowning on multiple family members running for office only works against Republicans.