Slashdot Mirror
What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your Spam
bednarz writes "For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World."
I find the idea of doing this to receive a free PC a fantastic irony, don't you?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"Mooney says, noting that the sudden upsurge in junk mail left the neighborhood postman somewhat aghast. "It grew exponentially, so I stopped giving out my home address," she says, adding, "I am concerned about the environment.""
It's all well and good that she had an alias and a free pc to be subject to this open invitation for harassment, but to actually really give out your home address to these spammers is a bit reckless. She will, at a minimum, be regretting this for years since the "current resident" will be getting spam even if she directs the post office not to deliver mail to her alias.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Since the point of the experiment wasn't to test the operating system, why give the test subjects the operating system currently most affected by malaware[sic]?
Because the point of the experiment was to test the effect of replying to spam which has nothing to do with the operating system. They gave away PCs with the most popular operating system since they assumed that's what most of their participants would want.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I think her reaction to her spam is classic: "I was horrified," says Mooney, a realtor by profession. "It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."
Spammers love people like her--people so insulated by American corporate media that they think the internet is just another shopping mall. And what could possibly go wrong in a mall? God bless her.
She gave our her home address.
Yeah, that scared me too. I would have thought McAfee had a duty of care to prevent the participant doing something like that.
Giving a real, existing address to the scum of the earth can't be good for your health. Why didn't they set her up a PO Box or something?
Incidentally, the other worrying thing was this quote:
Overall, the most obvious result of the S.P.A.M. experiment was that the PC that McAfee had provided for the project noticeably slowed down, clogged up with spyware, Mooney says.
I really hope there was some sort of firewall running on that machine ...