On Thursday 27 July 2006 17:29 Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ B Gruff ] on Thursday 27 July 2006 17:24 \__
>
>> On Thursday 27 July 2006 16:55 Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>
>>> __/ [ B Gruff ] on Thursday 27 July 2006 16:50 \__
>>>
>>>> On Thursday 27 July 2006 15:12 Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> More than 95% of e-mail is 'junk'
>>>>>
>>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>>> | More than 95% of e-mail is junk, be it spam, error messages or
>>>>> | viruses, report mail monitoring firms.
>>>>> |
>>>>> | [...]
>>>>> |
>>>>> | Further work has shown that most of this junk mail is originating
>>>>> | on hijacked home computers.
>>>>> |
>>>>> | E-mail security firm Return Path said 99% of the computers it
>>>>> | monitors that send mail have been taken over by spammers or virus
>>>>> | writers.
>>>>> `----
>>>>>
>>>>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5219554.stm
>>>>>
>>>>> Microsoft Windows MUST be illegalised.
>>>>
>>>> Damnation - that's *another* area where the US leads the UK.
>>>> Between them, they account for 25% of all spam, but they are streets
>>>> ahead of us, 23.2% to 1.8% - and to make matters worse, they are #1,
>>>> and we are
>>>> #10 :-(
>>>
>>> USA is number 1.... for SPAM export. It's actually one of my .sig's.
>>>
>>> There's a misleading aspect to this statement though... a snag if you
>>> like. While it might be true that most spammers (or most prolific
>>> spammers) are in the States, the figures only account for machines that
>>> are hijacked by spammers, not the spammers themselves. They could use
>>> America as a zombie nation but live elsewhere.
>>
>> True. However, it could also be true that American spammers use the
>> machines of other nations? I don't see why you prefer one scenario over
>> the other?
>
> You argue that there's a point of balance here... a sort of
> global equilibrium where one takes machines from the pool,
> at random. If that were the case, come to consider how many
> among the world's machines are located in the States. It's
> only natural to assume that a lot of SPAM will originate
> from there, assuming worldwide O/S monoculture. A SPAM per
> capita (where capita is a machine, or one inhibitant) would
> be a more meaningful thing for this survey. They could
> normalise all the figures by population size. Whilst you
> could easily do this by looking at Wikipedia, finding out
> how many machines have not yet retired and are also
> connected is hard. And then you need to normalise by on-line
> time, bandwidth, etc. It makes it a high-dimensional
> problem, assuming you seek meaningful statistics from which
> to conclude country X is most spam(mer)-friendly.
Well, yes, I hear what you say.....
However, to give them their due, the American authorities have been clamping
down?
Therefore, one might expect that American spammers are "driven abroad" -
compelled more to use foreign machines?
Do we have any figures for "internet-connected machines" by country?
Also, I'm not too sure about this bandwidth theory. I get the impression
than Korea and Japan has more "bandwidth per capita" - at least on the
basis of home users and small businesses - than (even) the U.S.
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