Python Forum

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:29:58 -0400, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:

> On 04 Jun 2010 05:41:17 GMT
> Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>> Sure, a lot of those 1,800 posts are spam, but the spammers wouldn't
>> waste their time if they didn't think there were people still on
>> Usenet.
> 
> Kidding, right?  Cost to spam is virtually zero so the ROI is pretty
> close to infinite no matter how many people they reach.

What, you think the Russian mob hands out their botnets for free?

Spam is a business. An evil, unethical, immoral, scum-sucking business, 
but still a business, and like all businesses, spammers care about cost 
and profit. The marginal cost of sending spam might be approaching zero, 
but the total cost isn't, and spammers try to maximise the number of 
eyeballs they reach while minimising the cost. If they weren't, they 
would still be using the same spam techniques from the 90s, instead of 
engaged in an arms race with anti-spam apps.

This is why things like picture spam comes in waves. Every few months, 
some newbie spammer hits on the brilliant idea of putting his spam in a 
jpg image, carefully obfuscating it so that OCR software can't recognise 
the URL but humans can, pays his $200 (or whatever it is) to rent a 
botnet, and for two weeks everybody gets an uptick in spam because the 
anti-spam apps can't filter picture spam very well.

And then they discover that the morons who buy from spammers aren't just 
stupid, they're lazy too. Nobody is going to type the URL into their 
browser, that's too much like actual work. So the spammer learns that his 
investment didn't make him any profit, and he tries something else, or 
gives up, and the picture spam disappears for a few more months until 
some other newbie fails to think things through.

If there weren't people reading the spam on Usenet and buying whatever 
junk is being sold, the spammers would move on.




-- 
Steven