Interesting statistic of the day...

[xthread]

From Bruce Schneier's article in Forbes about why we're stuck with spam so long as the underlying economics remain the same, the following interesting piece of information:

A 30-second prime-time television television ad costs 1.8 cents per adult viewer; a full-page color magazine ad about 0.9 cents per reader. A highway billboard costs 0.21 cents per car. Direct mail is the most expensive, at over 50 cents per third-class letter mailed... Typically, spammers charge less than a hundredth of a cent per recipient. And that number is what spamming houses charge their customers to deliver spam; if you're a clever hacker, you can build your own spam network for much less money.

Comments

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I expect a lot fewer people have automatic filters to delete the billboard from their field of vision though :)

I suppose with TiVo and ReplayTV more people are acquiring the ability to filter on television...

[xthread.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that Tivo is already mucking both with ad content and ad rates, as a side effect of viewers being able to filter out television ads..

[toxgunn.livejournal.com]

Although entertainingly not for lack of attention - not sure what Dr. Mann has been up to lately, but recall seeing a paper about ho0w his 'shades autodetected billboards and replaced those images with something more pleasant.

[evilcyber.livejournal.com]

Bruce touches on some things, but misses a few key points. He gets close with "if you're a clever hacker...". The thing is, most bot nets these days are leased to spammers.

Let me repeat:
Script kiddies are building huge botnets and selling them to spammers.

White list mechanisms, tarpits, computationally expensive mechanisms are all greatly diminished when the spam is shotgunned out from 100,000 machines.


Unfortunately, I have no solutions, but I advocate the Russian approach.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I know that he's aware of it, I think he was editing (or possibly even editED) that out of the Forbes article simply because it would be hard to explain to the expected audience.

[kest]

which is why we really need to be going after spammers' kneecaps much more than we currently are.

[evilcyber.livejournal.com]

See above re: Russian approach.

Actually, see this instead:
http://mosnews.com/news/2005/07/25/spammerdead.shtml

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Ironically, I was most intrigued that adult fewers only cast 1.8 cents.

[(Anonymous)]

I have a gmail account which I use strictly as an anti-spam filter, because gmail's antispam is the best I have ever seen. I .forward my 15-year-old email address which gets 800+ spams a day, and pop it back to me with getmail once a minute. Over the past month, five spams got through, and I haven't had a false positive in the seven months I've been doing this (that I know of!)