Indian Talent, Global Content
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Indian Talent, Global Content |
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March 2010: What's in the breeze |
The Problem of SPAM
'Spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam! Err… Dreadful spam!' Gone are those days when I would feel dejected because I had nothing waiting for me in my inbox early in the morning or the excitement when I saw a small envelope indicating someone wrote to me after my last login. Receiving mail at one time used to be the best feeling in the world. However nowadays, rarely does that happen – unsolicited email or spam is increasing by the day and being a major source of concern for many due to volume, irrelevance, violation of privacy, deceptiveness and message offensiveness. Neither does one feel unhappy to not have received any mail or thrilled to have gotten any, because in most probability there would be at least one piece of junk or spam waiting. It often makes us ask the question if email is actually a productivity gain or a productivity drain? There was nothing known as spam when the Internet commenced. Email existed but none of commercial nature as it was never thought of as Internet was purely used for educational and military purposes. Monetary gains via the Internet were unheard of and so commercial mailings did not exist. Sometime in the 1980s, the trend of mass mailing and advertising on the ARPANET became popular due to cost and time offloading. In the 80s, few companies used email through distribution lists for internal communication with occasional unmeaningful messages being sent to thousands of employees worldwide. Spam in modern sense, i.e., commercial spam was launched in 1994. This revolution of mass spamming began when a couple, Canter and Siegel began using Usenet to advertise immigration legal services and gained a thousand customers and earned about $100,000. Spam is nothing but electronic junk mail. People send mails to advertise their products and services, or to draw traffic to their web sites. Initially commercial scam was just an advertising medium, but lately spammers have started using this to organize scams, frauds and to send offensive messages for theft and for personal entertainment. It has been used as a vehicle of deception to induce customers to provide confidential information to commit identity theft. Nevertheless like any other business, the main goal for spamming is profit. As the Internet grew, so did spam. This clearly illustrates that as technology is getting bigger and better, it is also becoming more attractive to those with less dignified intentions. Spam today has become an industry. 2004 statistics by insideSpam.com declare 40% of the 31 billion emails sent daily are spam. According to Vircom in 2004, advertising spam formed 36% of all spam followed by adult related with 31.7% and financial services with 26.53%. A more recent study in 2006 by Symantec claims that spammers are shifting tactics. People have become familiar and are getting better at avoiding adult spam forcing spammers to shift their focus to financial spam, followed by health, product and then adult related spam. The latest trend is the pump and dump spam where mass mailings containing the 'hot tip' for the stock market or misleading and fraudulent statements of various companies are sent out to drive up stock prices. A study into global distribution of spam by Sophos in 2004, concluded that USA was responsible for the highest proportion of spam being sent, generating about 42.11% followed by Korea with 13.43%, China with 8.44%, Canada with 3.34% and the rest of the world with 26.97%. Few years back, spam was a minor irritant. However, the increase in scale and effect of this epidemic has led to focus on this problem. The success of spamming is explained by its low cost, as it hardly costs anything to get email addresses and hardly any effort as thousands of mails can be sent by a single click. The average spam message costs the spammer $0.0005 as compared to direct mail which could cost $1.21, meaning it is virtually free. With such low costs spammers can break even with a response rate of 0.001%. According to statistics by CipherTrust, adult related websites have a 0.05% response rate after receiving lewd links by emails, 0.02% for pharmacy related drugs and 0.0075% for all other product related spams. However cost advantages for spammers have to be paid up by the recipients. In this age of ICT, the smoke of spamming has touched almost everyone, some directly, while other passively. Spam advertisements ranging from health supplements to "no" interest loans to wonderland partners are common fillers of personal disk space for most people inclusive of mine. Suddenly even unheard 1-2GB computers are becoming redundant. On a personal level, people are left with no choice but to continuously keep changing their email addresses, creating both a personal and business nuisance. Genuine individual business people, wishing to take advantage of mass mailing lose significantly, due to generalization of branding them in the same cult as mass spammers. Spam has started taking its toll in system administrators, business corporations and end users with its tangible cost of wastage of disk space along with the band - width that is wasted while downloading these. Others include, huge funds that are spent on installation of anti - spam and filtering systems and training. However the biggest displeasure of this plague is the loss of productive hours and annoyance that is faced by reading and sorting unrequested and obnoxious information, both at personal and professional level, effecting individuals as much as organizations. Postini's, study concluded that 15 minutes a day of dealing with spam could cost companies as much as $3,200 per employee/year. Apart from advertisements, a trickier form of spam are a huge bunch of false emails that pretend to be from a trusted source or as close important frequent use like E-bay or Paypal, with financial warnings, leaving you in a predicament of reading as well as avoiding spam filters. From a personal experience, in 1998 at a summer placement, I saw the effects of a spam mail on the sentiments of some of its employees. A chain mail was received by one of the employees that dealt with a man who needed funds for a kidney transplant. The recipient was all set to send a cheque to him and also forwarded the email to all personal and business addresses including all clients and employees of the company worldwide including the senior management. An immediate mail was sent to all by the IT department to ignore the email, as it was a hoax. The recipient who forwarded the word was very upset initially for the sender's miseries and then felt humiliated because her confidence had been violated. Apart from the valuable work-time loss and personal trauma, more critical was the loss of trust in an important medium of mass communication originating from such rogue emails on genuine organizations like Red Cross or AID. These non-profit could gain significantly from cheap communication mediums as compared to paper mails. Sadly, sometimes such messages can have a damaging penalty, even after the delete key has been pressed. Last are the creepy computer viruses merged with spam emails which have given spammers a new set of tricks as hackers have started using advertising messages to install malware such as viruses, spyware, adware and Trojans. Postini's study concludes 10 out of 12 messages processed for Postini users with spam filtering enabled are spam. In addition to that, 1 in 90 messages is virus infected. They claim to quarantine more than 100,000 viruses per day. That email not only signaled the end of his personal memories on his laptop, but also brought down the system of the entire department of a reputed university for four days, sending tremors to many graduate students for loss of their hard work and lost productivity. On an individual level, this friend became vary of new technologies exemplified by his decision of reverting back to long walks to libraries. Like a passive smoker, it affected me in form of monetary loss of maintaining expensive long distance communication with him by costly telephonic medium as compared to taking advantages of development of cost effective Internet Communication Technology (ICT) mediums like VOIP, SMS and Chats, due to his fears in possible software downloads again ruining his hardware. Besides the short-term economic loss in form of valuable human work hours, in long term a non-profitable educational institute with limited resources had to invest significantly on anti-spamware, which indirectly affected the students with hiked tuition fees. Like any form of art and business, spammers have branched out of the world of emails by expanding their ab(use) to other forms of ICT such as internet telephony, SMS, instant messaging, newsgroup and blog spam. Ten years back, in the innocent age of ICQ, random chatting would be fun. However, today the thought of random chatting sends shivers, as spammers, extending beyond to marketers, hijack the Internet. Just now, while I was busy typing away on my computer, a window from MSN popped with the nickname (¯`•._.•Â§}{•._.•´¯) asking me to be e - friends. Sometime back, a friend was being harassed by a user who she kept blocking but he kept coming back with different accounts. These have become hot beds for illicit activities and users, as proven by fact that 1 in 3 of child abusers use the online medium. If this was not enough, Skype, the poster child of VoIP with about a million users worldwide fell prey to this. Very often do I get calls from random users on Skype, with content just not limited to marketing. Recently, I was a victim to an ordeal when the offensive caller crossed limits of privacy by asking me if I would like to see 'naughty things'. The spammer was trying to push me towards his unethical adult site through his messages. As if, the regular random IM spam wasn't bad enough, that this has started. It is very disheartening when wonderful innovations like Skype are abused by users. Not only are unethical and deceptive messages sent, spammers also use these software's to spread viruses and worms. With regulations on medium of telecommunications along with declining response rates to email and messaging spam, spammers have sought the help of mobile phones by continuing to bombard users through texting or missed calls. These dupe users into calling premium rate numbers or simply disgust them by sending immoral messages or providing wrong information. I personally learnt my lesson, falling prey to one such innocent looking SMS offering cash reward for naming Madonna's latest album. I immediately responded to the message, only to have reality bite me in the form of another text notifying me that I was charged £1.50 for the text with an additional requirement of my calling a number to collect the prize and that I would be charged £2.25 per minute. A US study, claims that 1 in 6 or 18% mobile phone owners have received unsolicited advertisements on their devices. This depicts how it could damage the economies of new technology sectors, leading to hardened stances taken recently by people like Bill Gates against anti spam who himself gets spammed 4 million times a day or in other words receives 43 spam messages a second and apparently has an entire department of 'human filters' solely taking care of it. Developed nations like US tried to fight off this epidemic at a local level by enacting laws to curb spamming and halt spammers on their soil, only leading to relocation of problem to developing countries that anyways lacked technical, financial and knowledge resources to combat spam. As a result, developing nation users suffer from less reliable services and are more distrustful of the Internet. These users normally use a dial - up Internet access that is slow and expensive and with wasted and unneeded downloads and viruses, it discourages them from using the Internet. At this time, developed nations still suffer from spamming, with no control over spammers operating from align soils, besides passing blame and generalizations to ignorant participants of third world, intensifying the existing global divide. But all this doesn't negate the importance of email as a medium of communications. Like anything in nature, it has also become prey to excessive use reducing the value of one the biggest innovations in electronic communications. As email grew in popularity, so did the concept of using it as a channel to competently and cheaply send spam. However, very often we fail to look at the other side. Before telemarketing laws were enforced, marketers could call prospective customers at anytime of the day, resulting in calls from early morning to evening. In such a situation, to most people email would be a better option and less bothersome than the ring of a phone call. However in order for email to contribute to economic and social development, its consistency, proficiency, reliability and trustworthiness are paramount. Epidemic spread of unsolicited, unwelcomed and harmful messages in form of spam threatens consumer confidence in ICT mediums of communications and data security. If we don't design it to be spam proof, we will not only lose email, we will also lose the usefulness of our mobile phones! As the tech mantra has become. 'If you build it, they will hack it'. Current levels of spamming are fast approaching levels that can be equated to organized crimes terrorizing the innocents, with an unknown enemy taking advantage of the disguised nature of the virtual world. It has crossed limits and is a war that can no longer be fought at an individual level with people, industries or states, but rather necessitates a combined legal, technological and consumer global effort at all scales. Various initiatives have been taken in various part of the world to fight this. For example, the USA passed the CAN - SPAM or 'controlling the assault of non - solicited pornography and marketing act' which spurred genuine businesses to comply with the requirements specified when advertising. Since 2004, public agencies from various countries met to enforce the London Action Plan in which laws were imposed to combat spam. Organization for Economic Co - operation and Development (OECD) countries agreed on a five point international co - operation program to aid governments, business and the public fight against spam. In addition to legislation, various information technology sector companies like Microsoft and Yahoo are researching and proposing more advanced anti - spam tactics, which attack spam at the domain and IP, address levels. As it is said, only two things are assured in this life - death and taxes. I would plead to add spam to this as this has become a way of life as people spend hours of their days weeding through their emails to sort spam from legitimate emails. In the end, it again raises the biggest dogma for any science: - "Will we let the evil in us to win in converting this innovation which has the ability to bring cheers of light and energy in people, into another atom bomb"? Will we react and how will we? Will this message ever spam into right minds? For now, let's enjoy the free chocolate by clicking the hyperlink below.
>> Read more articles written by Chillibreeze writers:1. Articles related to Content and Outsourcing
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