Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered

Karellen !-P writes "Vardan Kushnir, a notorious russian spammer who headed the English learning centers, the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head."

Comments

Dying in tiny slices

[TapestryDude]

I remember reading about how Steve Jobs motivated the original Mac team to speed up the boot. "Millions of people will boot their Macs every day; if you can shave 30 seconds off that boot time, it's the equivalent of three human lives every day". If that concept is true (debatable, but stick with me) then spammers, in the aggregate, are killing dozens or even hundreds of people a day ... a few seconds here and a few seconds there. So, in this respect, what goes around comes around.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[AKAImBatman]

I have a feeling that this has less to do with his spamming efforts and more to do with the mafia. From what I understand, a lot of spammers, script kiddies, and crackers in Russia have connections to the mob. The reason for this is that the mafia tends to use cyber-warfare (such as DDOSes) for blackmail, and spam for revenue generation. Apparently the spam networks are quite sophisticated, with one person finding and validating addresses then selling them to the highest bidder.

In other words, things may be more complex then they seem...

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[Frumious Wombat]

Another day on the froniers of capitalism.

About 10 years ago (and if it's a lot better there now, sorry for outdated information), the NY Times had two articles summing up the new Russia.

One was on business practices, with the comment, "to enforce a contract, you often have to take out a contract".

The other was on a clinic doing heroin detox. The basic system was thugs would patrol the streets, find people doing heroin, club them into submission, drag them to the clinic and chain them to a bed, and then let them dry out cold turkey. The Doctor in charge said, "of course this is not the optimal treatment, but here ... ".

Looks like our spammer's fate falls under one of those two categories of "solutions". As others have said, it probably wasn't the spam, it was, "just business".

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[AJWM]

Last (okay, only) time I was in the Soviet Union (not long before the end), there was at least McDonalds, Baskin-Robbins, and Pizza Gut (there's no letter 'H' in Cyrillic).

Numbers, and points to ponder

[Thaelon]

I seriously doubt this guy was killed just for spamming, but let's assume he was for discussion. While on the surface it may seem that the punishment (death) far exceeds the crime (spamming) let's do a little math.

Say I spend 10 seconds managing my spam every 2-3 days. That's 28 seconds a week. No big deal right?

Say I've been doing it for the last 5 years and will continue to for the next 55.

(5 + 55) * 52 weeks * 28 seconds a week = 87,360 seconds (24.266~ hours). Still not that bad, just one day.

Someone who lives 80 years only gets 700,800 hours to live.

That means spammers only have to annoy 28,879 people ( 700,800 / 24.266~ = 28,879 ) before they've wasted an entire (long) human lifetime worth of time. Now I know it's a bit of a stretch to equate a human lifetime worth of time to the life of an actual human being, but I begin to wonder. My time is very valuable to me and I'd rather not waste a single second of it deleting unwanted advertisements from my inbox.

But let's take it a little further. According to this there are 6,454,864,470 people on earth at the time of this writing. Say spammers only annoy 5% of them (a low estimate I would guess) for their entire lives. That's still 322,743,223 people who lost a day's time to spam.

24.266 hours per person * 322,743,223 people = 7831902223.6 hours wasted.

That's 11,175.66 human lifetimes!

If you want to equate those to actual deaths here are some comparisons:

"British Medial Journal indicating that passive smoking kills over 11,000 people in UK." (http://www.sdlp.ie/pr2march2005.shtm).

"To take prostate cancer as an example, although it kills over 11,000 men a year..." (http://www.icr.ac.uk/press/releases/cancerchip.ht ml)

"Gun violence kills over 11,000 Americans every year..." (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2002/11 /08/opinion/6293.shtml)

These were extremely low estimates, the world's population is growing, and the amount of spam is growing.

Still think the punishment didn't fit the crime? I'm not sure anymore myself.