Archive: Opinions

Yesterday I asked my wife if she minded if I also married one or two Russian brides.  I told her that according to my email there were many who desired me, and what would she think if I married one or two of them?  She replied, 'It's OK with me if they cook and clean.'  I decided not to go ahead with that plan, because, according to hundreds of other email messages I really need male enhancement drugs.  Some tell me I need female enhancement drugs.  In any event I don't really like taking drugs, so forget it.

Everybody jokes about spam and scam emails, but the fact is that they represent some very bad people ruining the Internet for the rest of us.  Email is an incredible innovation, but according to one 2007 study 80% of it was spam.  According to Google spam was up 53% more in the second quarter of 2009 than in the first, and 6% higher than the same time in 2008.  A study that year found that dealing with each spam email took 16 seconds for a cumulative loss of $70 billion across all U.S. Businesses.  The New York Times reported in March of last year that spam is up to 94% of all email.

According to reports the volume of spam was reduced considerably when San Jose-based McColo Corp.'s servers were cut off from Internet access.  According to some security experts the company was responsible for hosting spammers that accounted for 75% of all junk email.  But the volume has come back up.  I guess the jerks who send all this junk found someone else to let them.

Google Postini Services estimates that a company with 100 employees working 245 days per year at an average of $65 per hour, receiving 50 spam emails per day and wasting 5 seconds on each costs the business $110,590.28 per year and 106 days of lost productivity.  That's $1,105.90 per employee and 25.3 hours per hear.

That doesn't begin to address the time and money we spend dealing with malware, viruses, spyware, and other malicious attacks.  Or the attacks on Web sites -- last year an attack on our own sites cost us an entire day of work, much of that time with two people repairing the sites.  Ours is a very small company, and the repairing the attack pretty much shut us down for that day.

And how many people fall for scams?  Get Adobe products for a tenth or less of what they cost, or help me get money out of Nigeria?  A number of Lansing folks including me got an e-mail from someone who had hacked an acquaintance's email and Facebook accounts, claiming she was mugged in London and please send money for a ticket home.  The jerk even used her Facebook account to send Instant Messages (IMs) to people she knows.

When I got my IM I knew it was a scam because it had all the earmarks of one.  The bad guy was very earnest about 'her' alleged difficulties, and it wasn't until I typed, 'Too bad you are not my friend.  Nice try!' that the moron typed a few lines of choice language that confirmed it was not her.

All the time we spend fixing problems caused by this mail costs real time and dollars.  I once had to reinstall Windows on a machine that was seriously compromised.  I also lost some vital data, as well as a huge chunk of time.  When a relative's email was hacked and used to send a virus, my cousin trusted it because it supposedly came from him.  Alas, he clicked, and it took a long time for a Cornell technician to undo the damage.

Over the holiday break I set up a host-based spam filter for our company's email.  It was set up so that filtered spam would go to a catch-all mailbox.  Or actually the subject line, to and from addresses would be downloaded to my computer, not the body of the spam.  In less than a month that this has been implemented our spam has been significantly reduced.  So far only three legitimate emails, and only one important one, have been caught in the spam box.  Hundreds appear in that box every day.

The idea of the Internet is supposed to be freedom, and the benefits are huge.  They could be a lot huger if it weren't for the terrorists who use that freedom and accessibility to deliberately sabotage the majority who are honest users.  Governments across the world should become more aggressive about finding and prosecuting these people.  And make no mistake, they are terrorists.  If I meet one it will be hard to resist waterboarding him.

----
v6i2