This article tells a very personal story about how a memorial web site's guestbook was horridly defaced by spammers (via John Battelle). In a similar vein, Michael Blowhard asks how spammers make money off of cluttering blog comments with their irrelevant spam.
It's all about (a) gaming the search engines for better placement in search results (which is really working less well as time goes by), and (b) far-fetched, unbridled, irrational greed.
If you'd like to see these people in action, check out the sleazy n o w XX m y XX s e a r c h -dot- c o m (remove the "XX"s to form a .com domain name), where they are selling applications that spam guestbooks and blog comments, and exploit vulnerable old versions of formmail.pl.
Ten years ago I gave a talk about security to the Web sociology class at Duke. My thesis since then has been that in any community, offline or online, there is a perceived ambient level of security. In many rural communities in the US, people don't lock the doors on their homes or cars, which is unthinkable in a city. The growth of the Internet into a global, all-inclusive community has brought with it a decline in the perceived ambient level of security. Systems that were wide open in the past, now have to be protected with barriers to entry.
Email, blog comments, guestbooks, and email web forms, are some of the last wide open spaces on the net. For the most part, they are wide open for the same reason; a wide-open, unauthenticated mode of communication is more useful because it allows people to connect with you that you would want to connect with you had you only known and pre-authorized them. In a world where prior authorization is required to communicate, something is lost. Because of this tension, the technology still remains mired in the past. There exist systems for authorization of messages, but they are mostly poorly thought out and even less widely adopted. But socially, closure of email authorization is happening practically. People have learned from the 60%+ of email that is spam to not publicize their address too widely, to change it frequently, etc., which is a non-technical way of creating simple authorization hurdles. The same thing has been happening with telephones. We have a service on our home landline that detects if you are calling from a line without calling number ID, and if so shunts you to a system that asks for your name, and allows us to choose whether to take the call or not -- pretty effective at getting rid of most spam calls.
Take a look at the sleazy site mentioned above. These people are openly gaming Google PageRank, they are open and unrepentant about clogging up other people's communication media to play this game, and they clearly think it is a realistic and justifiable way to make money.
Who makes money off of this? Clearly, the guys selling the spamming applications are making money; similarly, the guys selling address lists are making money up front. I think that, for some of the early entrants into the spam biz, they made money just like direct marketers in offline media, by garnering sales from some tiny percentage (<1%) of recipients who are suckers for their angle. I think that spam has since become so ubiquitous that the response rates have probably declined further and further (one can hope in the general educability of the human race), which is why the email spam game has turned more and more, lately, into one of propagating viruses that harvest addresses from your addressbook, turn your PC into a zombie mail relay for sending spam, or both. These folks are lured by the idea of easy money, but are finding it ever harder, and are becoming ever more desperate.
Meanwhile, the Internet technologies, which carried so much promise of openness and connection, will continue to turn increasingly toward more privacy, more closed off islands, less openness. This, I submit, is the natural way of things.
Enough spammy thoughts for now. More later. What do you think?
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