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Project Honey Pot Traps Billionth Spam
EastDakota writes "Project Honey Pot today announced that it had trapped its 1 billionth spammer. To celebrate, the team behind the largest community sourced project tracking online fraud and abuse released a full rundown of statistics on the last five years of spam. Findings include: spam drops 21% on Christmas Day and 32% of New Year's Day; the most spam is sent on Mondays, the least on Saturdays; spammers found at least 956 different ways to spell VIAGRA (e.g., VIAGRA, V1AGRA, V1@GR@, V!AGRA, VIA6RA, etc.) in mail received by the Project; and much more."
I have seen 945 of the spellings in my inbox just last week.... damn spammers
I really thought \/!@gra looked promising. Also, most spam is in your inbox when you get to work and most spammers don't send on the weekends.
Is spam even really spam anymore?
Every now and then I take a look at my gmail spam folder, and none of the messages contain links or even coherent sentences.
Nothing being sold, nothing being said... What's the point?
1 billionth spammer
So approximately one out of every 7 people on earth is a spammer?
Isn't that like McDonald's 99 billion served, or are one-sixth of us spamming?
It's been a long lonnnng time since I've actually seen a spam message that I didn't immediately recognize as spam... Maybe some people are completely ignorant of the fact that someone on the internet is out to take your money (*gasp!*), but honestly, how can the amount of effort expended in creating spam compare to the amount of money they receive from suckers who click on "V1AGRA!11!!" links?
I'm just sayin'...
Spammer is supposed to be the person who spams our mail boxes. If there were a billion of those then approximately 1 in 7 people in the world would be a spammer. That number is unthinkable, even for Florida's and Brazil's standard..
Maybe now with a billion samples, we can start training people how to recognize it.
Let's celebrate with a song we all know: "Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam..."
Now repeat 1 billion times...
(Sad to think that way more spam has been sent than the number of times that Monty Python sketch has been played; should be the other way around)
You can't fix stupid.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Their web site claims, "We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers." Have they actually prosecuted any spammers using this?
If it helps create better spam filters, yay. But I'd really like to know if any spammers are being punished as well.
Sorry, but only the 2nd joke was moderately funny; the rest are just retarded.
The article says clearly:
On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message
In fact, the title of the article is:
Our 1 Billionth Spam Message
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Putting aside for a moment the potential medical issues, I wonder how much money would be saved in the US economy if we just legalized the selling of Viagra over the counter?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I must get a billion spam in one year. :(
Damn spammers
If you total up all the productivity lost to fighting spam and time wasted getting spam, it's probably cheaper to just put the spammers out of business by giving every male on earth free Viagra.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
viagra can be misspelled many ways
in an email message.
all of them not as direct as
going and using this way of
routing the word around filters,
and not even misspelling it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They face a lot of STIFF competition!
To celebrate,
Personally I think 1 billion spam isn't something to celebrate. "Mourn" is more like it...
I've only been able to come up with 796 versions of viagra. I'm sure there must be many more. Can I download the list? It would help in my work^h^h^hhobby...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The most effective way of stopping spam thus far is using IP blacklisting. It should be noted if the net moves to ipV6, that will be the end of blacklist effectiveness for some time.
ID10T
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
Sorry for moderating you overrated. I meant to click 'Funny'. Posting to undo.
I posted in this thread to undo a moderation misclick. That has wiped my 'Funny' moderation of my parent's post. Sorry. Someone please mod parent Funny :)
I wonder how many of those Viagra spelling variations are valid Perl code...
The first rule of Spam Club, is never talk about Spam Club.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Yea, lets celebrate the evolution of a stupid, fundementally unwinnable and pointless battle between spammers and spam fighters.
Do they keep statistics on how many legitimate messages (viagra jokes!!) were marked as spam and never brightened the day of their intended receipients?
From personal experience the number of legitimate technical emails that get marked as spam (Either disappear outright or customers later fishing out of their spam folders) is nothing short of rediculous. SNR, total lack of reliability and trust significantly reduces the utility of the Internets messaging system.
The current mail system desperately needs some morsal of trust injected otherwise it will have no future. The amount of life being sucked from the world as a whole reading/deleting/falling for SPAM is nothing short of a greek tragedy.
Unfortunately those cooking up naive solutions feed into the evolution of filter avoidance by spammers while at the same time reducing the reliability of the Internets SMTP messaging system.