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Google Says Spam Volumes On the Rise
alphadogg writes "Despite security researchers' efforts to cut spam down to size, it just keeps growing back. The volume of unsolicited email in the first quarter was around 6 percent higher than a year earlier, according to Google's e-mail filtering division Postini. Security researchers have won a few significant battles against the spammers in the last year, first against those hosting the spammers' control systems, and later against the control systems themselves, but they will have to change tactics again if they want to win the war. In the first half of last year, security researchers concentrated their efforts on identifying the ISPs or hosting companies that allowed command-and-control servers to operate, and shutting these botnet purveyors down. The success of that tactic was short-lived, however."
Now, maybe he makes that two grand back in his push and maybe he don't. Maybe your new method reduced his clicks from five hundred to five per month. Either way the best we can hope is that at some point that income shrinks to negative or so little it's not worth his time. The problem is that even if 0.0001% of his spam messages generates a click, he's making bank.
The battle for clean e-mail should be fought on a number of fronts. Public awareness is the key weak link in the chain in my opinion. And as a new net savvy generation arises, that will come naturally.
No matter how much I tell my friends and family to be safe on the net, my friend in Cairo had ten credit cards opened in her name and I had to help her clean it up over here. To make sure it didn't happen again we went over smart procedures like if your bank sends you an e-mail you should read it and then open up your browser by hand and type in the bank's URL as you know it by hand and look for the corresponding information on the site. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass but if you can't find it you can always just call them. Don't click the e-mail link and drop your username and password into some site you don't trust. If I had to guess how she got tripped up, it was when she went to Cairo for school she couldn't afford to talk on the phone and had gotten lazy and careless with doing all her banking online.
My work here is dung.
It still has to travel thru email servers & routers costing money via electrical & bandwidth costs.
There is a war going on for your mind.
It still has to travel thru email servers & routers costing money via electrical & bandwidth costs.
Aren't people around here rather fond of making the claim that bandwidth doesn't cost money, at least whenever we see a story pop up about some ISP wanting to impose caps or metered billing?
The bandwidth and electrial costs of spam are negligible. You would have made a better argument by pointing out the lost productivity when humans need to divert time away from useful tasks to clean out their inbox.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
constantly fighting it is just one of those maintenance functions of civilization
you don't declare a war on spam, win it, and then spam is forever gone. thats not the nature of the problem. its forever reborn as some "brilliant idea" in the mind of some asshole out there who has no problem abusing the commons for selfish gain. it requires constant eradication. additionally, you can't completely automate the process of spam destruction. spam is created by creative human beings. human beings always find away around any locked door. and therefore it will require the constant effort of creative human beings dedicated to police work to forever fight these other creative beings who have no decency. that's just the way it is. its stasis: good guys versus bad guys, forever
the same applies to hard core drug addicts, pedophilia, terrorism, etc: you don't declare war on terrorism, pedophilia, or hard core drugs, win it, and then those phenomena are gone forever. thats not the nature of those problems. they will always be low grade problems that always reassert themselves. unless you stop fighting them: in which case they metastasize into worse problems
as long as civilization exists, certain classes of utterly intolerable problems (problems that you cannot in any way reclassify as tolerable problems) will continually reassert themselves in every generation, and, for the sake of the health of society, require constant hard effort to simply keep them as low grade issues that don't expand into worse problems
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sounds like you switched to a less-than-reputable host...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Contact your host, or switch. It isn’t Google’s fault if you signed up for a host which got its entire IP range blacklisted by allowing its customers to send spam and ignoring the subsequent spam complaints. I’m not saying that’s definitely what happened, but there’s a good likelihood it’s exactly what happened.
It’s unreasonable to expect Google to start white-listing customers from a sleazy host on an individual basis. Screening customers is the host’s job and they failed; now they got blacklisted and all their customers suffer. Yell at the hosting company, not Google. If enough of their customers leave because they aren’t cracking down on the spammers, they’ll suddenly realise that not doing anything about the spam is hurting them economically just as much as terminating a few spamming customers would. And if they don’t realise this, or if it wouldn’t... that isn’t the sort of host you want to be associated with.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.