I agree that some people may respond to and buy this stuff. What I've said all along is that there's no way that the small percentage of people who buy this stuff can account for the enormous financial growth that the spam industry sees.
Not to let the tin-foil in my hat get too large but...
Wasn't there an article about Bill Gates' credit card # being stolen? How about the articles in the news about databases of 10s of thousands of credit cards being stolen?
Could it be that these client databases, so carelessly left open to public perusal, are concocted to lend legitimacy to the statistical sales fallacy of advertising?
While we have an electronic database, can this be correlated with shipping numbers? These are pharmaceutical supplements--medications being distributed to people with claims of physical enhancement. If this stuff really were being mailed to the addresses wouldn't the FDA just be having a crap fit? Wouldn't it be easy enough to track the warehouses that this junk is going through? How about the manufacturing? You can't just go to your local Wal-Mart and put in an order for 6000 pill bottles, gel-tab capsules, and the blending equipment needed to pack and fill each capsule with fiber filler.
Logistics. Packaging pills isn't something you can do in your basement. If these places are actually distributing pharmaceutical products from their basements then the FDA should be all over them and the shipping records would be a lot easier to track since all of it must be recorded on shipping manifests which are, by law, available to the DOT upon request.
The bottom line then: disbelieve in the statistical sales fallacy. If a person doesn't buy a product out of 40 pieces of spam, there's little to no reason to believe that increasing the number to 400 will make them buy even one. In fact, as the number gets above 20 more people are inclined to select all and delete.
With that in mind, with the statistical sales line disproved, what possible ways can you think of which would actually generate revenue for spam?
As I've been posting all along... It has to be a scam based in business insurance, small business loans, venture capital, and brokerage houses putting together investment portfolios on penny stocks.
----- Having worked for a '.com' company, and having seen it go down despite them having a real product and actual customers for it, and seeign what that meant for the people involved as well as for the investors in it, I can quite confidently say that it looks nowhere like a spam business and that the business plan wasn't remotely similar either. ----- In the business world you're making a critical mistake. You care.
I sympathize with you. I really do. I have seen many of my own ventures get sucked right down the tubes no matter how much effort I've put into it. I've seen groups of people frustrated and crestfallen because the project was tanked. The fact is that the powers above never lose out. They're making money even if it loses. At a high enough level of business there is acceptable loss especially if the loss can be written off in taxes or collected on in insurance. It is at _that_ level that the spam businesses resemble the.coms. The venture capitalists in the back room, the managers in the brokerage houses, the CEO who collects $500k-$1M/yr. for four or five years until the business tanks. These are the people who are not hurt. These are the people who profit. These are the people who have no problem taking their profit, setting up the next smokescreen company, finding the next set of 30 employees to put together a viable workplace and work the next scheme for another $500k-$1M/yr. for the next five years.
It is at that level that the business model is the same. The people at those levels don't care about the salaried employee. They don't care about the investors who lose life savings. They don't care about the life/auto/home/health insurance companies jacking up rates to cover the losses on business insurance.
It's a predatory world protected by laws which distance corporations from those who see them as nothing more than a vehicle to collect a big paycheck for as long as possible and then skate away from the mess just before it capitulates.
----- from all I have seen from venture capitalists they are noit interested in the kind of thign that spam offers, so I simply fail to see any reasomn why they'd consider putting money into it ----- The VCs aren't investing directly in spammers. Likely they're investing in "desktop advertising agencies". Likely they're investing in what they have been led to believe are legitimate business ventures. The VC isn't going to show up at the office every day and audit where all the money is spent or how the servers are used. As long as there's a business insurance policy on the table to cover losses if the business tanks the VCs probably don't give two hoots what goes on.
Small business loans don't discriminate. An MBA who knows how to write a good business proposal to compile databases of consumer interest can make it sound good and justify it with contacts.
I'm not a spammer, I don't know exactly how it works. What I do know is that there can't be that many people buying h3b4l v1aGr4. Even the least tech-savvy people that I know wouldn't respond to an advertisement that includes 20+ lines of gibberish at the bottom. Since the bottom line product is obviously a farce one _MUST_ start looking at other potential ways of creating income. The easiest vector that I can think of is to milk junk bonds, or fudge numbers based on number of e-mails sent out to justify a flawed business model.
Really. If one person gets 60 e-mails for junk products, are spammers really hoping that they'll randomly sign up for one out of the 60? It doesn't make any sense. For this to be viable from any logical point of view there _MUST_ be something going on behind the scenes.
Just for one moment... put aside any misconception that statistical sales is real. I don't buy the "if 0.1% people respond and buy" line. As people receive more and more spam, I'd say they're more likely to select all and delete. The numbers become less significant as they get larger. So just for one mom
I do not happen to live in a small town where most people know each other. Your first assumption is wrong.
I know of only 4 of my schoolmates who still live in the same metropolitan area where we grew up. My college tracks its alumni as long as we send contact info back.
Now you're going to pin me on age just because I haven't felt an emotional need to reconnect with old classmates from the past? If it's going to happen it'll happen. If not it won't. What is this superiority you're clinging to from being able to find old classmates on the internet? Show me ONE example, just ONE, where someone's life has been climactically enhanced by finding an old classmate on the 'net? I've talked with people who've bumped into old classmates or old acquaintences. They get together, they have dinner a few times, they discuss a few common experiences from old times, and that's it. It was nice, it passed a few evenings, but no one has had any revelations about finding God because someone they knew 10 years ago sent them an e-mail.
And still, this has approximately what to do with spam? Once again, if any of my old classmates would Google! for my name they would come up with at least one of my e-mail addresses. I've tried it--it works. I don't get spam.
Maybe I'm just special but I still think that if you're getting lots of spam you're doing a lot more than leaving traces for old classmates. Try not signing up for the $100 in free coupons, or the free Super New Cheerios, or the Chance To Win A Dream Vacation, or the Win A New Car Sweepstakes. You're just asking for it.
----- Your statement implies it has the same flawed business model as the.com bubble, while it does not ----- The.com bubble was ENORMOUSLY profitable for many people who were high enough up the ladder. The majority of Americans may have lost out but I don't think it was planned for our benefit.
----- The spam business model is not fed by such investors but is 'properly fed' from the bottom by its customers. ----- Everything I've posted on this topic has been to forward the hypothesis that the spam business model is fed from the top and just worked as a cycle, similar to the.com bubble, with a faster turnover rate.
----- Yes. both use a business model, NOT THE SAME ONE. ----- I disagree. This is what I've been saying the whole time: they use the same business model. The same people in the same VP and higher positions are milking the cycle for all its worth with every turnover. The.com bubble had a boom-bust lifespan of about 5 years and netted billions for those who were in the know. The spam business cycle has a lifespan of about 3-6 months and probably nets around $50k per cycle. Maybe it's not as profitable but every little bit counts.
----- or come with some actual proof ----- _THAT_ is the most classic troll.
Person: "I have a possible explanation." Troll: "Prove it!" Person: "I can't. This is just discussion." Troll: "Then you're wrong."
Is it your life purpose to work against me? Is your default setting "disagree"?
Maybe it'll come to you in your sleep. You're being argumentative at the moment and not even trying to figure this out productively.
----- why it failed for the.coms ----- Get it out of your head. It didn't fail for the.coms. People got rich off that scam.
----- whom their customers were or alternatively, where the venture capitalists are that are invest8ing hugely in that spam business hype ----- Oh right. Like I work on Wall Street. Even if I did on Wall Street they don't just hand out customer lists like quarterly shareholder reports. You are familiar with confidential client information? You're being a classic armchair troll.
----- No, I'm trying to get you to understand that simply because hiding your email address simply does not work for everyone. ----- Once again you're assuming that I'm hiding my e-mail address. I'm not. It's publicly available in a large number of places. I simply choose not to send my e-mail address to every vacation offer, free credit report check, home mortgage counselor, customer service registration, and free trial of Super New Cheerios.
----- You act like every business with a web presence is run by fools, which makes you a fool. ----- How did businesses get dragged into this? The spam problem has always been addressed from a private individual point of view. No where have I ever seen the complaints that the "webmaster@" or "abuse@" accounts are getting spammed out of control. Most businesses have web interfaces for receiving generic mail from the general public which doesn't disclose the interior e-mail address. Where is this huge business problem that you're trolling for? How am I all of a sudden ripping on every business with a web presence? Granted, if they're posting the e-mail addresses of employees on a publicly available WWW page with a bunch of honeypot keywords then they're asking for it. Can you point to a site which does that? I can point to a few thousand that don't. ATI, AT&T, Pfizer, Merck, General Motors, Ford, Mercedes Benz, Dell, FIC, Shimano... People who leave an e-mail address on public pages for developers reasons know that account is going to get hit hard. But you weren't talking about developers, were you? No. You were talking about businesses. Feel free to take the developer argument and run with it, though, now that I've given it to you.
----- Someone who is lookign for you after having lost contatc is extremely unlikely to call you to get your e-mail addy you know ----- If I knew them in college they can call the alumni office. If I knew them in high school they can call any number of the circle of friends who still live in the city. It's not that tough.
Unless you're talking about that hot chick that I met at the Crystal Method concert back in '98. We never shared any contact info, not even names, so it'd be a shot in the dark anyways.
----- For the rest your reasoning sounds oh so logical, but is extremely impractical for most people who actually have to communicate outside their small circle of friends and family. ----- Those people have business cards. If they're putting their home/personal/private e-mail on a public page which has all the spammer keywords in the title, well, then they _are_ morons.
Why am I asked to justify common sense against the most extreme fringe cases possible?
For someone who proposes that they're writing a paper in psychology you're ignoring a big part of it.
The psychology behind the "something to hide" confrontation is to put the target at a disadvantage due to shame or guilt. It's a passive-aggressive attack mechanism meant to prey on people with guilty consciences. If the target has transcended the guilt and shame that society has built into them then the attack has no effect.
Incidentally your advice here is ill founded and could get people into trouble.
----- If they ask What? Tell them either that you can't tell them because you're hiding it ----- Under no circumstances should you ever play smart games with the police. This is a sure way to arouse suspicion, get searched, detained, or hauled off for questioning. "How?" you may ask. It's called "obstruction of justice". The officer asked you a question. Quit wasting everyone's time.
----- or, if you're up for the performance go into great detail, at great length about some legal but freakish sexual adventure ----- This also falls under playing smart with the police and is downright _STUPID_. You're likely to catch a ticket for obstruction of justice or interfering with the duties of a police officer. They have any number of different things on the book. If you're sufficiently freakish the police officer has every right to detain you or have you checked into the local psychological evaluation ward. They have every right to do it.
You're just trolling to watch an amusing piece on the news, aren't you?:-)
----- How many of Windows' flaws are due to the kernel? Very few ----- Hahahaha! Who needs to look for flaws in the Windows kernel when one can easily turn a Windows box into a zombie drone through faulty user space apps?
If ever Windows would ever get a good suite of secure user space apps _THEN_ we may have to start picking through the Windows kernel. I've no doubt that we'd find a free range there as well.
----- Few have succeeded. L4, Eros, Mach, and the Hurd were unsuccessful. ----- I'll take issue with this as well. The Mach was unsuccessful? Have you ever heard of Mac OS X?
----- You can't register a domain name ----- My life doesn't revolve around a domain name. The average price, that I've found, for a domain name/web hosting/DNS hosting/with SHELL ACCESS (my personal requirement) is about $40/mo. I'm sure if I got one service from here, another from there, and patched it together with glue from the other place I might be able to jimmy it all with a few redirectors and $30/mo. but I can't justify the expense just for a cute little web page that the psycho down the block will use to identify me as the next potential victim.
----- but neither can anyone else ----- Anyone who wants my address has asked me for it. Once in a while one of them forgets it. At that point they call me.
----- If an old friend tried to find you, they couldn't. ----- I understand. People get harvested into spam because they're so alone, and need to be held, and are just waiting by the phone for that old friend to get in contact with them, so they leave their e-mail address everywhere... just in case.
Puh-leez. Life moves forward. Have faith. If your old friend was meant to get back in touch with you they will. If it wasn't meant to happen then it won't. Life will take care of the details.
----- Your "solution" is to hide your head in the sand ----- Not at all. My name is listed in MSN, Yahoo, Hotmail, and ICQ directories as well as being updated with my former schools and on any number of mailing lists, and the people with whom I chat have no problem getting in touch with me.
You were hoping to play me as lonely, weren't you? Hehehehehehe.
Everyone--from good hearted people to downright argumentative trolls--misses the point on spying.
I don't care about online privacy. I'm not worried about government spooks sifting through my e-mail or web surfing habits and finding out that I like brunettes with long legs, long hair, and almond shaped eyes. It really doesn't concern me. If it were some supercomputer sitting in a back room chewing through e-mail looking for "homicide, suicide, terror, assassinate, secret, password, 9/11" or some other stupid set of keywords or tracing kiddie porn that'd be fine by me. At least until the anti-pr0n people decide that moral righteousness has no bounds and start coming after willing adults with no real sex life and a speedy net connection.
Face it. We live in the real world. People in power let it go to their heads and they often use it for purposes other than those in which it was given to them for.
What I'm worried about is that the guy down the block is an FBI agent. Or CIA. Or NSA. Or some local politician who knows one. One day I'm walking down the street and a candy wrapper drops out of my pocket onto his lawn. Now this guy is such a straight laced Bible thumping tight a__ POS that he uses his political muscle to find out who I am and begin harassing me. "He dropped a candy wrapper on my lawn! He's a litterer! He's no good for society! Besides, I saw him carrying home a six-pack of beer! He must be an alcoholic as well!"
Where's the check and balance? There is none. Who could prove it? No one. Who can stop it? No one.
Echelon, Big Brother surveillance, the Anti-Terror bill. They all suck for the same reason that the Windows registry sucks: there's no way to secure them from people misusing them to hijack the system.
I don't think that the spam operations themselves are legitimately publicly traded businesses. I forward the hypothesis that they are run by people who have set up legitimate, possibly publicly traded businesses as fronts.
It's the same complex business pyramid cycle that led to the.com boom-bust, only this is a cycle that propagates and lives and dies on a 3-6 month basis. Like mosquitos. Do you watch the news? You see that guy in the suit in the back room reading papers at his desk? What do you think he does when he goes home at night? He dabbles in penny stocks. Where does the money from those penny stocks come from? If you believe news stories you'll think it's his own private money. In reality there are thousands of people dabbling in penny stocks using money that they receive on short term loan from other brokerage houses dealing in penny stocks. What are all of these penny stocks? They're junk bonds, to vaporous businesses, some with little more than a PO Box and a telephone number which may or may not work. What do these businesses do? They do nothing but subcontract and subcontract services over and over to each other. They're cleaners. They're nothing but numbers on a ledger or in a spreadsheet through which to push money. These small businesses have two things of interest to the brokerage houses: a bank account and an insurance policy. If the business lives or dies it's not a concern for the brokerage house or the lender. They'll collect on the insurance policy and the insurance company will tack the losses to your auto, home, life, and health premiums. What do these small businesses really do? A person with an in depth knowledge of the business world can put together a convincing business plan and use short-term exploratory investments to set up two servers and a business net connection. What does he do with that? He pitches the business to some brokerage house that's trying to put together a cohesive portfolio in "grass roots small business subsidies" or some other apple pie, feel good propaganda pitch. This brokerage house then goes out and sells its feel good apple pie line to a larger brokerage firm.
These are not just turkeys that live down the block and work at the local foundry. These are people who graduated with MBAs and formed the social connections necessary to know where the paperwork goes, who has to sign it, and how it has to be filled out to look legit. The people running these operations don't always know that they're funding spammers. Have you seen the subcontracting breakdown for a federal building or renovation project? It's the same on the stock market. The major houses go to the mid houses. The mid houses go to the major and minor houses. The minor houses service anyone they can, including banks, credit unions, and local investment brokers. The banks, credit unions, and local investment brokers are watching applications for business licenses and applications for business loans. The people monitoring the applications are often feeding info to their cousin/brother/aunt/old roomie working in the major and mid houses. All of these people are working at their own desks, pushing nothing but paper, and no one knows that the guy who walked in the door to give a 15-minute presentation for a legit "desktop advertising clearinghouse" is really using 85% of the business investment to feed his old fraternity brother with enough money to send out spam for three months. Then they'll junk the business and the bank won't care because they had a valid insurance policy before they ever signed the loan.
If spam were as illegal as the CANSPAM Act and all the hype and hoopla makes it seem shouldn't it be easy enough for credit agencies to latch onto these people and refuse to run their funds? Sure, it should, so why don't they? Because no one gives a flying rats bottom. They're all pushing paper, and getting paid, and as long as the business insurance is good then no one cares that the business only lasted three months. I'm sorry
----- how could veteran architects within Microsoft's R&D not? ----- There are two explanations and both start with "they did see the implications"
1) and disregarded them because the features provided would help sell the product. Bottom line is all that matters especially with a gargantuan EULA to shield them from all responsibility.
2) The top veteran architects within the MS management circles also run big spam houses and profit from spyware and adware. This was a guaranteed market.
----- Possibly, but even investment bankers want loan payments eventually ----- You need to learn from the.com boom-bust cycle. Investments in spam are like miniature.com boom-busts. As long as the people high enough up the chain can fund it, milk it up to get more money, then crash it and take the money to feed other more long-term profitable ventures then it was all worth it. Small business insurance may even cover a portion of it in which case your rising home insurance, car insurance, and health insurance rates feed it.
Nothing personal. Just business.
Where's the evidence for people actually buying products from spam mailings? You have one poster child on the local news and another poster child from NY Times. Those two poster children are hardly enough to fund all of it.
----- Well guess what: they do ----- You've never been to a flea market, have you? Sure people buy the junk but it never receives national attention and they don't prosper the way spammers do.
I can't say that I am impressed by the knee-jerk responses of "the revenue comes from the people who buy the stuff." Clearly there's a statistical chance that the profit from this junk feeds the machine but, if that were so, the spam machine would be little more than the local flea market. As we all know the spammers can often be very upscale and sophisticated sometimes have multiple server and router banks with which to turn on and off IP address ranges as they get caught, targeted, shut down, or blacklisted.
So the question remains: Where really does the funding for this stuff come from?
People are going to slam me for presenting this possibility and, well, bring it on. Personally, I think that a good amount of spam is funded by us--you and me. Go ahead. Get enraged. Gnash your teeth. Call me a paranoid hippie tree loving freak. I could give a shit.
Face reality. It's a business game. A good portion of the taxpayer subsidized/backed loans for technological advancement and small business loans probably go to shmucks like this. These are people who are buddy-buddy with politicians and existing business heads. These are the people who sit on top of brokerage houses and know where to get the startup funding. These are people who have been proven time and again to have no scruples about working over every pyramid scheme possible to get their hands on your money. These are people who can conjure up numbers generated from spam mailings, work the statistical analysis over to their favor, and pitch it to some new investment broker who is scraping to fill his quota and willing to take a chance. Whose money is he willing to take a chance with? Why, once again its yours and mine. 401k funds, IRA funds, generic stock investment funds.
Go ahead. Say its not possible. Mod me down as stupid. If anyone could ever really use the FOIA and manage to get enough of the tax records from these spam organizations to track it all down you can bet that I'm right.
Go on. Get mad. Come on... you know you can do it... be mad at me for being the messenger... let it all out.
How long before every screen saver, icon set, and "neat app" writer starts dropping junk in.kde? or.gconfd? KDE and Gnome both favor moving towards interoperable application information sharing because it makes things easier for the end users. Both desktop environments are developing not only to advance the functionality of Linux but also the the useability and featurability of Linux..kde isn't like a . directory for a typical app because KDE is the operating environment. I cringe when I look at my Debian system logs and see references to gconf and that gconfd-2 process that sits in my ps just screams to me "I'm waiting to be exploited, somehow, some way, by someone, maybe in the future, maybe when I have more functionality, but I'm here and I'm going to compromise your system!" I don't see how KDE is immune to this. As KDE grows it'll incorporate the same thing in one form or another.
----- If the registry or the filesystem gets bloated because of malfunctioning application uninstallers, how is that MS' fault? ----- The registry was a bad idea from the start. The registry may have been designed and implemented for storage of specific useful information which would contribute to interoperability between applications but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to look ahead and see that every screen saver, toolbar, and "neat app" author would start filling the registry full of excess junk keys that mean nothing to the rest of the system. Additionally there are more than a few ways to hijack.dlls using the registry, Back Orifice, Sub7, and NetBus come to mind.
That is why I blame MS for the registry. It would be a good idea if the user was consulted for every new key added. That can't be done because the user can't be bothered. Unfettered, unrestricted application access to a housekeeping system with as much clout as the registry should plain not be possible. Since it's impossible to secure the registry the registry never should have been implemented.
KDE and Gnome are following the same path to h-e-double-toothpicks.
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I agree that some people may respond to and buy this stuff. What I've said all along is that there's no way that the small percentage of people who buy this stuff can account for the enormous financial growth that the spam industry sees.
There _MUST_ be more to it.
Not to let the tin-foil in my hat get too large but...
Wasn't there an article about Bill Gates' credit card # being stolen? How about the articles in the news about databases of 10s of thousands of credit cards being stolen?
Could it be that these client databases, so carelessly left open to public perusal, are concocted to lend legitimacy to the statistical sales fallacy of advertising?
While we have an electronic database, can this be correlated with shipping numbers? These are pharmaceutical supplements--medications being distributed to people with claims of physical enhancement. If this stuff really were being mailed to the addresses wouldn't the FDA just be having a crap fit? Wouldn't it be easy enough to track the warehouses that this junk is going through? How about the manufacturing? You can't just go to your local Wal-Mart and put in an order for 6000 pill bottles, gel-tab capsules, and the blending equipment needed to pack and fill each capsule with fiber filler.
Logistics. Packaging pills isn't something you can do in your basement. If these places are actually distributing pharmaceutical products from their basements then the FDA should be all over them and the shipping records would be a lot easier to track since all of it must be recorded on shipping manifests which are, by law, available to the DOT upon request.
I don't believe it. Not even for a minute.
Alright.
The bottom line then: disbelieve in the statistical sales fallacy. If a person doesn't buy a product out of 40 pieces of spam, there's little to no reason to believe that increasing the number to 400 will make them buy even one. In fact, as the number gets above 20 more people are inclined to select all and delete.
With that in mind, with the statistical sales line disproved, what possible ways can you think of which would actually generate revenue for spam?
As I've been posting all along... It has to be a scam based in business insurance, small business loans, venture capital, and brokerage houses putting together investment portfolios on penny stocks.
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.coms. The venture capitalists in the back room, the managers in the brokerage houses, the CEO who collects $500k-$1M/yr. for four or five years until the business tanks. These are the people who are not hurt. These are the people who profit. These are the people who have no problem taking their profit, setting up the next smokescreen company, finding the next set of 30 employees to put together a viable workplace and work the next scheme for another $500k-$1M/yr. for the next five years.
Having worked for a '.com' company, and having seen it go down despite them having a real product and actual customers for it, and seeign what that meant for the people involved as well as for the investors in it, I can quite confidently say that it looks nowhere like a spam business and that the business plan wasn't remotely similar either.
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In the business world you're making a critical mistake. You care.
I sympathize with you. I really do. I have seen many of my own ventures get sucked right down the tubes no matter how much effort I've put into it. I've seen groups of people frustrated and crestfallen because the project was tanked. The fact is that the powers above never lose out. They're making money even if it loses. At a high enough level of business there is acceptable loss especially if the loss can be written off in taxes or collected on in insurance. It is at _that_ level that the spam businesses resemble the
It is at that level that the business model is the same. The people at those levels don't care about the salaried employee. They don't care about the investors who lose life savings. They don't care about the life/auto/home/health insurance companies jacking up rates to cover the losses on business insurance.
It's a predatory world protected by laws which distance corporations from those who see them as nothing more than a vehicle to collect a big paycheck for as long as possible and then skate away from the mess just before it capitulates.
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from all I have seen from venture capitalists they are noit interested in the kind of thign that spam offers, so I simply fail to see any reasomn why they'd consider putting money into it
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The VCs aren't investing directly in spammers. Likely they're investing in "desktop advertising agencies". Likely they're investing in what they have been led to believe are legitimate business ventures. The VC isn't going to show up at the office every day and audit where all the money is spent or how the servers are used. As long as there's a business insurance policy on the table to cover losses if the business tanks the VCs probably don't give two hoots what goes on.
Small business loans don't discriminate. An MBA who knows how to write a good business proposal to compile databases of consumer interest can make it sound good and justify it with contacts.
I'm not a spammer, I don't know exactly how it works. What I do know is that there can't be that many people buying h3b4l v1aGr4. Even the least tech-savvy people that I know wouldn't respond to an advertisement that includes 20+ lines of gibberish at the bottom. Since the bottom line product is obviously a farce one _MUST_ start looking at other potential ways of creating income. The easiest vector that I can think of is to milk junk bonds, or fudge numbers based on number of e-mails sent out to justify a flawed business model.
Really. If one person gets 60 e-mails for junk products, are spammers really hoping that they'll randomly sign up for one out of the 60? It doesn't make any sense. For this to be viable from any logical point of view there _MUST_ be something going on behind the scenes.
Just for one moment... put aside any misconception that statistical sales is real. I don't buy the "if 0.1% people respond and buy" line. As people receive more and more spam, I'd say they're more likely to select all and delete. The numbers become less significant as they get larger. So just for one mom
I do not happen to live in a small town where most people know each other. Your first assumption is wrong.
I know of only 4 of my schoolmates who still live in the same metropolitan area where we grew up. My college tracks its alumni as long as we send contact info back.
Now you're going to pin me on age just because I haven't felt an emotional need to reconnect with old classmates from the past? If it's going to happen it'll happen. If not it won't. What is this superiority you're clinging to from being able to find old classmates on the internet? Show me ONE example, just ONE, where someone's life has been climactically enhanced by finding an old classmate on the 'net? I've talked with people who've bumped into old classmates or old acquaintences. They get together, they have dinner a few times, they discuss a few common experiences from old times, and that's it. It was nice, it passed a few evenings, but no one has had any revelations about finding God because someone they knew 10 years ago sent them an e-mail.
And still, this has approximately what to do with spam? Once again, if any of my old classmates would Google! for my name they would come up with at least one of my e-mail addresses. I've tried it--it works. I don't get spam.
Maybe I'm just special but I still think that if you're getting lots of spam you're doing a lot more than leaving traces for old classmates. Try not signing up for the $100 in free coupons, or the free Super New Cheerios, or the Chance To Win A Dream Vacation, or the Win A New Car Sweepstakes. You're just asking for it.
----- .com bubble, while it does not .com bubble was ENORMOUSLY profitable for many people who were high enough up the ladder. The majority of Americans may have lost out but I don't think it was planned for our benefit.
.com bubble, with a faster turnover rate.
.com bubble had a boom-bust lifespan of about 5 years and netted billions for those who were in the know. The spam business cycle has a lifespan of about 3-6 months and probably nets around $50k per cycle. Maybe it's not as profitable but every little bit counts.
.coms .coms. People got rich off that scam.
Your statement implies it has the same flawed business model as the
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The
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The spam business model is not fed by such investors but is 'properly fed' from the bottom by its customers.
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Everything I've posted on this topic has been to forward the hypothesis that the spam business model is fed from the top and just worked as a cycle, similar to the
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Yes. both use a business model, NOT THE SAME ONE.
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I disagree. This is what I've been saying the whole time: they use the same business model. The same people in the same VP and higher positions are milking the cycle for all its worth with every turnover. The
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or come with some actual proof
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_THAT_ is the most classic troll.
Person: "I have a possible explanation."
Troll: "Prove it!"
Person: "I can't. This is just discussion."
Troll: "Then you're wrong."
Is it your life purpose to work against me? Is your default setting "disagree"?
Maybe it'll come to you in your sleep. You're being argumentative at the moment and not even trying to figure this out productively.
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why it failed for the
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Get it out of your head. It didn't fail for the
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whom their customers were or alternatively, where the venture capitalists are that are invest8ing hugely in that spam business hype
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Oh right. Like I work on Wall Street. Even if I did on Wall Street they don't just hand out customer lists like quarterly shareholder reports. You are familiar with confidential client information? You're being a classic armchair troll.
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No, I'm trying to get you to understand that simply because hiding your email address simply does not work for everyone.
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Once again you're assuming that I'm hiding my e-mail address. I'm not. It's publicly available in a large number of places. I simply choose not to send my e-mail address to every vacation offer, free credit report check, home mortgage counselor, customer service registration, and free trial of Super New Cheerios.
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You act like every business with a web presence is run by fools, which makes you a fool.
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How did businesses get dragged into this? The spam problem has always been addressed from a private individual point of view. No where have I ever seen the complaints that the "webmaster@" or "abuse@" accounts are getting spammed out of control. Most businesses have web interfaces for receiving generic mail from the general public which doesn't disclose the interior e-mail address. Where is this huge business problem that you're trolling for? How am I all of a sudden ripping on every business with a web presence? Granted, if they're posting the e-mail addresses of employees on a publicly available WWW page with a bunch of honeypot keywords then they're asking for it. Can you point to a site which does that? I can point to a few thousand that don't. ATI, AT&T, Pfizer, Merck, General Motors, Ford, Mercedes Benz, Dell, FIC, Shimano... People who leave an e-mail address on public pages for developers reasons know that account is going to get hit hard. But you weren't talking about developers, were you? No. You were talking about businesses. Feel free to take the developer argument and run with it, though, now that I've given it to you.
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Someone who is lookign for you after having lost contatc is extremely unlikely to call you to get your e-mail addy you know
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If I knew them in college they can call the alumni office. If I knew them in high school they can call any number of the circle of friends who still live in the city. It's not that tough.
Unless you're talking about that hot chick that I met at the Crystal Method concert back in '98. We never shared any contact info, not even names, so it'd be a shot in the dark anyways.
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For the rest your reasoning sounds oh so logical, but is extremely impractical for most people who actually have to communicate outside their small circle of friends and family.
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Those people have business cards. If they're putting their home/personal/private e-mail on a public page which has all the spammer keywords in the title, well, then they _are_ morons.
Why am I asked to justify common sense against the most extreme fringe cases possible?
----- .com bubble began, is still there after the .com bubble is logn gone..
Spam was there before the
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Which doesn't negate anything I've said.
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I really don't see how you think it is similar in any way.
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Read my post. Business model. Business model. Business model.
Please, tell me you're trolling on purpose.
Speaking of "exclusive private clubs", and spam, and adware, and malware, and viruses, and sexually transmitted diseases...
In Massachusetts two guys can get tax credits and social security benefits for banging each other in the butt...
And I still can't smoke a doobie legally. WTF?
Speaking of DNA, and gametes, and protein strands..
In Massachusetts two guys can get tax credits and social security benefits for banging each other in the butt...
And I still can't smoke a doobie legally. WTF?
Speaking of viruses...
In Massachusetts two guys can get tax credits and social security benefits for banging each other in the butt...
And I still can't smoke a doobie legally. WTF?
If I had mod points parent would get two for Funny.
For someone who proposes that they're writing a paper in psychology you're ignoring a big part of it.
:-)
The psychology behind the "something to hide" confrontation is to put the target at a disadvantage due to shame or guilt. It's a passive-aggressive attack mechanism meant to prey on people with guilty consciences. If the target has transcended the guilt and shame that society has built into them then the attack has no effect.
Incidentally your advice here is ill founded and could get people into trouble.
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If they ask What? Tell them either that you can't tell them because you're hiding it
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Under no circumstances should you ever play smart games with the police. This is a sure way to arouse suspicion, get searched, detained, or hauled off for questioning. "How?" you may ask. It's called "obstruction of justice". The officer asked you a question. Quit wasting everyone's time.
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or, if you're up for the performance go into great detail, at great length about some legal but freakish sexual adventure
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This also falls under playing smart with the police and is downright _STUPID_. You're likely to catch a ticket for obstruction of justice or interfering with the duties of a police officer. They have any number of different things on the book. If you're sufficiently freakish the police officer has every right to detain you or have you checked into the local psychological evaluation ward. They have every right to do it.
You're just trolling to watch an amusing piece on the news, aren't you?
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How many of Windows' flaws are due to the kernel? Very few
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Hahahaha! Who needs to look for flaws in the Windows kernel when one can easily turn a Windows box into a zombie drone through faulty user space apps?
If ever Windows would ever get a good suite of secure user space apps _THEN_ we may have to start picking through the Windows kernel. I've no doubt that we'd find a free range there as well.
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Few have succeeded. L4, Eros, Mach, and the Hurd were unsuccessful.
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I'll take issue with this as well. The Mach was unsuccessful? Have you ever heard of Mac OS X?
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You can't register a domain name
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My life doesn't revolve around a domain name. The average price, that I've found, for a domain name/web hosting/DNS hosting/with SHELL ACCESS (my personal requirement) is about $40/mo. I'm sure if I got one service from here, another from there, and patched it together with glue from the other place I might be able to jimmy it all with a few redirectors and $30/mo. but I can't justify the expense just for a cute little web page that the psycho down the block will use to identify me as the next potential victim.
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but neither can anyone else
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Anyone who wants my address has asked me for it. Once in a while one of them forgets it. At that point they call me.
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If an old friend tried to find you, they couldn't.
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I understand. People get harvested into spam because they're so alone, and need to be held, and are just waiting by the phone for that old friend to get in contact with them, so they leave their e-mail address everywhere... just in case.
Puh-leez. Life moves forward. Have faith. If your old friend was meant to get back in touch with you they will. If it wasn't meant to happen then it won't. Life will take care of the details.
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Your "solution" is to hide your head in the sand
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Not at all. My name is listed in MSN, Yahoo, Hotmail, and ICQ directories as well as being updated with my former schools and on any number of mailing lists, and the people with whom I chat have no problem getting in touch with me.
You were hoping to play me as lonely, weren't you? Hehehehehehe.
Everyone--from good hearted people to downright argumentative trolls--misses the point on spying.
I don't care about online privacy. I'm not worried about government spooks sifting through my e-mail or web surfing habits and finding out that I like brunettes with long legs, long hair, and almond shaped eyes. It really doesn't concern me. If it were some supercomputer sitting in a back room chewing through e-mail looking for "homicide, suicide, terror, assassinate, secret, password, 9/11" or some other stupid set of keywords or tracing kiddie porn that'd be fine by me. At least until the anti-pr0n people decide that moral righteousness has no bounds and start coming after willing adults with no real sex life and a speedy net connection.
Face it. We live in the real world. People in power let it go to their heads and they often use it for purposes other than those in which it was given to them for.
What I'm worried about is that the guy down the block is an FBI agent. Or CIA. Or NSA. Or some local politician who knows one. One day I'm walking down the street and a candy wrapper drops out of my pocket onto his lawn. Now this guy is such a straight laced Bible thumping tight a__ POS that he uses his political muscle to find out who I am and begin harassing me. "He dropped a candy wrapper on my lawn! He's a litterer! He's no good for society! Besides, I saw him carrying home a six-pack of beer! He must be an alcoholic as well!"
Where's the check and balance? There is none. Who could prove it? No one. Who can stop it? No one.
Echelon, Big Brother surveillance, the Anti-Terror bill. They all suck for the same reason that the Windows registry sucks: there's no way to secure them from people misusing them to hijack the system.
I don't think that the spam operations themselves are legitimately publicly traded businesses. I forward the hypothesis that they are run by people who have set up legitimate, possibly publicly traded businesses as fronts.
.com boom-bust, only this is a cycle that propagates and lives and dies on a 3-6 month basis. Like mosquitos. Do you watch the news? You see that guy in the suit in the back room reading papers at his desk? What do you think he does when he goes home at night? He dabbles in penny stocks. Where does the money from those penny stocks come from? If you believe news stories you'll think it's his own private money. In reality there are thousands of people dabbling in penny stocks using money that they receive on short term loan from other brokerage houses dealing in penny stocks. What are all of these penny stocks? They're junk bonds, to vaporous businesses, some with little more than a PO Box and a telephone number which may or may not work. What do these businesses do? They do nothing but subcontract and subcontract services over and over to each other. They're cleaners. They're nothing but numbers on a ledger or in a spreadsheet through which to push money. These small businesses have two things of interest to the brokerage houses: a bank account and an insurance policy. If the business lives or dies it's not a concern for the brokerage house or the lender. They'll collect on the insurance policy and the insurance company will tack the losses to your auto, home, life, and health premiums. What do these small businesses really do? A person with an in depth knowledge of the business world can put together a convincing business plan and use short-term exploratory investments to set up two servers and a business net connection. What does he do with that? He pitches the business to some brokerage house that's trying to put together a cohesive portfolio in "grass roots small business subsidies" or some other apple pie, feel good propaganda pitch. This brokerage house then goes out and sells its feel good apple pie line to a larger brokerage firm.
It's the same complex business pyramid cycle that led to the
These are not just turkeys that live down the block and work at the local foundry. These are people who graduated with MBAs and formed the social connections necessary to know where the paperwork goes, who has to sign it, and how it has to be filled out to look legit. The people running these operations don't always know that they're funding spammers. Have you seen the subcontracting breakdown for a federal building or renovation project? It's the same on the stock market. The major houses go to the mid houses. The mid houses go to the major and minor houses. The minor houses service anyone they can, including banks, credit unions, and local investment brokers. The banks, credit unions, and local investment brokers are watching applications for business licenses and applications for business loans. The people monitoring the applications are often feeding info to their cousin/brother/aunt/old roomie working in the major and mid houses. All of these people are working at their own desks, pushing nothing but paper, and no one knows that the guy who walked in the door to give a 15-minute presentation for a legit "desktop advertising clearinghouse" is really using 85% of the business investment to feed his old fraternity brother with enough money to send out spam for three months. Then they'll junk the business and the bank won't care because they had a valid insurance policy before they ever signed the loan.
If spam were as illegal as the CANSPAM Act and all the hype and hoopla makes it seem shouldn't it be easy enough for credit agencies to latch onto these people and refuse to run their funds? Sure, it should, so why don't they? Because no one gives a flying rats bottom. They're all pushing paper, and getting paid, and as long as the business insurance is good then no one cares that the business only lasted three months. I'm sorry
I start my Debian installs from 2.2r4 and have no problem getting all the updates without being owned.
Here's a hint: don't tell your script-kiddie friends your semi-static IP address just before you reinstall.
Of course, I reinstall Win98 without any problems, either. I don't know what the fuss is about.
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how could veteran architects within Microsoft's R&D not?
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There are two explanations and both start with "they did see the implications"
1) and disregarded them because the features provided would help sell the product. Bottom line is all that matters especially with a gargantuan EULA to shield them from all responsibility.
2) The top veteran architects within the MS management circles also run big spam houses and profit from spyware and adware. This was a guaranteed market.
----- .com boom-bust cycle. Investments in spam are like miniature .com boom-busts. As long as the people high enough up the chain can fund it, milk it up to get more money, then crash it and take the money to feed other more long-term profitable ventures then it was all worth it. Small business insurance may even cover a portion of it in which case your rising home insurance, car insurance, and health insurance rates feed it.
Possibly, but even investment bankers want loan payments eventually
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You need to learn from the
Nothing personal. Just business.
Where's the evidence for people actually buying products from spam mailings? You have one poster child on the local news and another poster child from NY Times. Those two poster children are hardly enough to fund all of it.
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Well guess what: they do
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You've never been to a flea market, have you? Sure people buy the junk but it never receives national attention and they don't prosper the way spammers do.
I can't say that I am impressed by the knee-jerk responses of "the revenue comes from the people who buy the stuff." Clearly there's a statistical chance that the profit from this junk feeds the machine but, if that were so, the spam machine would be little more than the local flea market. As we all know the spammers can often be very upscale and sophisticated sometimes have multiple server and router banks with which to turn on and off IP address ranges as they get caught, targeted, shut down, or blacklisted.
So the question remains: Where really does the funding for this stuff come from?
People are going to slam me for presenting this possibility and, well, bring it on. Personally, I think that a good amount of spam is funded by us--you and me. Go ahead. Get enraged. Gnash your teeth. Call me a paranoid hippie tree loving freak. I could give a shit.
Face reality. It's a business game. A good portion of the taxpayer subsidized/backed loans for technological advancement and small business loans probably go to shmucks like this. These are people who are buddy-buddy with politicians and existing business heads. These are the people who sit on top of brokerage houses and know where to get the startup funding. These are people who have been proven time and again to have no scruples about working over every pyramid scheme possible to get their hands on your money. These are people who can conjure up numbers generated from spam mailings, work the statistical analysis over to their favor, and pitch it to some new investment broker who is scraping to fill his quota and willing to take a chance. Whose money is he willing to take a chance with? Why, once again its yours and mine. 401k funds, IRA funds, generic stock investment funds.
Go ahead. Say its not possible. Mod me down as stupid. If anyone could ever really use the FOIA and manage to get enough of the tax records from these spam organizations to track it all down you can bet that I'm right.
Go on. Get mad. Come on... you know you can do it... be mad at me for being the messenger... let it all out.
I can take it.
Perhaps I'm looking ahead...
.kde? or .gconfd? KDE and Gnome both favor moving towards interoperable application information sharing because it makes things easier for the end users. Both desktop environments are developing not only to advance the functionality of Linux but also the the useability and featurability of Linux. .kde isn't like a . directory for a typical app because KDE is the operating environment. I cringe when I look at my Debian system logs and see references to gconf and that gconfd-2 process that sits in my ps just screams to me "I'm waiting to be exploited, somehow, some way, by someone, maybe in the future, maybe when I have more functionality, but I'm here and I'm going to compromise your system!" I don't see how KDE is immune to this. As KDE grows it'll incorporate the same thing in one form or another.
How long before every screen saver, icon set, and "neat app" writer starts dropping junk in
----- .dlls using the registry, Back Orifice, Sub7, and NetBus come to mind.
If the registry or the filesystem gets bloated because of malfunctioning application uninstallers, how is that MS' fault?
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The registry was a bad idea from the start. The registry may have been designed and implemented for storage of specific useful information which would contribute to interoperability between applications but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to look ahead and see that every screen saver, toolbar, and "neat app" author would start filling the registry full of excess junk keys that mean nothing to the rest of the system. Additionally there are more than a few ways to hijack
That is why I blame MS for the registry. It would be a good idea if the user was consulted for every new key added. That can't be done because the user can't be bothered. Unfettered, unrestricted application access to a housekeeping system with as much clout as the registry should plain not be possible. Since it's impossible to secure the registry the registry never should have been implemented.
KDE and Gnome are following the same path to h-e-double-toothpicks.