Spam is Back With A Vengence

Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before. In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."

Comments

The solution

[nurb432]

There are 2 steps to stop this ( well 3, actually )

1 - death ( yes, death, not jail ) for conviced spammers ( oh, and make it painful and long too )
2 - any company caught knowingly using spam as a way to advertise is forced to shut down and they lose all thier assets ( including personal )

Optional:

3 - anyone caught buying from a spam ad should be humiliated in public.

Re:The solution

[suso]

1 - death ( yes, death, not jail ) for conviced spammers ( oh, and make it painful and long too )

Please try to size the punishment to the size of the crime. Most civilized countries don't even have death sentence for serial murder. Also, your American laws don't carry much power over other jurisdictions, and convincing others to share death penalty for something like this would be hard.

Ok, I think you're missing something. You're trying to apply morality to this situation and I don't think spammers derserve that. At least not the worst of them. Spammers are a dime a dozen, and they all think that what they are doing is ok and that there are no consequences to it. I know this because I've talked to some directly. They don't have anything that is really scaring them into stopping what they are doing. And for every spammer that goes down there are 2 to replace that one.

What we really need is something like the Boogy Man is to children. Maybe not a vigilante that kills spammers (although I've said that this is a possible solution before), but something that would scare the living shit out of spammers and make them really worry that what they are doing is going to come to get them. And also makes new spammers realize what kind of risk they are getting into to.

Because all the anti-spam, laws, humiliation tactics that we are using now are doing practically nothing to prevent the problem from the beginning. Its time for more extreme tactics.

The cancer

[Anonymous Coward]

The cancer that is the stock market poisons everything it touches, I'm surprised it took this long for it to affect (NOT impact, affect) efficient e-mail.

The problem goes far deeper than spam here. I have concluded that it is impossible to fix, it must play itself out to its ultimate and so very final conclusion.

It is sad, but I am cheered by the statistical probability that intelligent life somewhere in the universe will not have fallen into this obvious self destructive trap. Life will go on, just not here.

Re:What's a ...

[cculianu]

I have no clue. I looked up "vengence" on m-w.com and it suggested a bunch of alternatives. Amongst them was the word vengeance . Perhaps the /. editor meant vengeance and not 'vengence' (whatever that means)?

Seriously, this glaring spelling error completely distracted me and I was unable to even read the article. It annoys me that despite /. being a big commercial site now, they still lack the professionalism of even a small-town newspaper.

Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

[TheRaven64]

Apple's Mail.app displays single-page PDFs inline. Do other mail clients not do this?