Hop 255

spam business model

A great diagram at Modern Life is Rubbish on the business model for spam. Just needs a spammer to fill in some of the details on ratio of spam to sales etc.

Ig Noble Awards 2005

The Ig Noble Awards are always very funny and worth reading. The 2005 prize for literature went to a very worth set of winners:

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

Charging for Calls

Flavor Sofa is a new service which allows users of VoIP or Instant Messaging to charge for calls. Not a lot of sellers at the moment but to be fair it has just launched. On the other hand paying someone $4.99 per minute to learn about SMS is probably not for the average punter. And I am not sure you could learn to fly a helicopter over Skype, even at $1.99 per minute. They also probably went a bit overboard with the spam solution angle in the press release  when they claim: "...because callers have to pay, the system is a very effective spam blocker. If you charge $10 to answer calls to your Skype address, you'll only hear from callers who are reasonably serious."  Exactly! You won't get calls at all from friend or foe.

Then again there are sillier charges in telecoms such as data roaming. 10 pounds per megabyte! No wonder many of the mobile carriers are  not thrilled about handsets with wifi.

Splogs

As much as hop255 hates spam we think we hate splogs more. After-all spam comes to us and can be filtered or easily deleted. Splogs, on the other hand, demand more time because, in searching for actual content, you need to bring up the page before moving on. Blogpulse has a good set of links on splogs including the wonderful splogspot. Other fun sites for detesters of spam websites (they need a name! How about spambites? Or perhaps an anagram) is spamgoogle (it would be useful if Google posted some stats on splogs etc at the same time as cleaning up blogger) and Splog Reporter.  For background on splogs there is not a bad article in today's WSJ albeit Technorati's Sirfy has been posting stuff on this for a while here and here (first one includes interesting stats). The WSJ has a quote from a Mr Butts, a splog software provider who "... denies that his software is used by spammers. He says it is used by business owners to automatically create blogs based on content pulled from their Web sites." Yeah right! In reality pulled from other's websites!

Nigeria and 419

We have all had spam, and 419 spam, from Nigeria. And we have discussed spam satire here before including the annual Nigerian email conference where lively debate ensured over "the effectiveness of uppercase characters" and "is 10 million emails a day too much". Today, however I came across the website of the worthy organisation in Nigeria that fights such scams. For posterity I record here their mission statement:

The EFCC will curb the menace of corruption that constitutes the cog in the wheel of progress; protect national and foreign investments in the country; imbue the spirit of hard work in the citizenry and discourage ill gotten wealth; identify illegally acquired wealth and confiscate it; build an upright workforce in both public and private sectors of the economy and; contribute to the global war against financial crimes.

"Cog in the wheel of progress" must be a popular expression in Nigeria as a scammer uses it here in a lively exchange with Retired Wing Commander Gilbert Murray DSO, CBE, SOB (rtd.) recorded at Scambusters.

SBC Pricing, Search SPAM, Skype Video

Lots of interesting stuff on the net today. SBC drop in broadband price will be good for accelerating the US market.  It will be interesting to see if the cable companies lower their prices this time (they have not done so in past but instead raised speed).  The fact that SBC's offer is not bundled should also help and put pressure on the cable companies to offer standalone broadband.

Also out today a new report on link spam. Not sure I buy all the conclusions as the evidence to date is that competing parties try to knock each other out of the search engine rankings. But the argument that link farms should be allies is worth posing. And a Skype video plug in from an independent. Will it prove again that most users don't want video telephony or is it different this time. From the Skype Journal report it doesn't sound like it fits the QoS or ease of use factor that has made Skype a star.

microsoft smart network data services

New anti-spam microsoft initiative described here.

spam satire

J-Walk has two of the best spam satire sites. The spam university and the one that still makes me laugh: "The 3rd Annual Nigerian Direct Mail Conference". Answers to important questions such as the effectiveness of uppercase characters and whether 10 million emails a day are to many?