{"id":45,"date":"2007-05-19T20:38:19","date_gmt":"2007-05-19T19:38:19","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-10-23T18:39:19","modified_gmt":"2010-10-23T18:39:19","slug":"it-the-spam-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=45","title":{"rendered":"IT: The Spam Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just fixed the scripts that create (and update) my <a href=\"http:\/\/zonky.org\/notes\/spam-report\">spam report<\/a>. I decided long ago not to block spam (previously it was difficult to block it properly because of how email was setup; I could properly block it now but it would ruin the report), so I could produce an archive of spam and do some basic analysis on the content. I&#8217;ve been running the report a few years now (the oldest spam in hand dates to roughly June 2003) and it now shows the expected trends &#8230; the number of spams is growing and the size of each spam message is growing (because many these days are image spams).<\/p>\n<p>Apart from the existence of spammers themselves (if they were to vanish overnight, nobody would mourn), there are two major contributions to the spam problem :-<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>People unwittingly providing the spammers with massive supercomputer with an enormous amount of network bandwidth available. Almost every<br \/>\nspam you and I get has been sent <em>via<\/em> someone&#8217;s infected computer. If you don&#8217;t have a router between your computer and the internet,<br \/>\nbuy one online in the next 15 minutes. Whilst there are other things you can (and should) do to make your computer more secure, a router is<br \/>\nprobably the biggest single thing you can do.<\/li>\n<li>ISPs who don&#8217;t bother to deal with infected machines. In the old days, if you were to warn a network administrator that they had a machine<br \/>\nwith a possibly dangerous infection sending large quantities of network traffic, they would move heaven and earth to fix the problem. Today<br \/>\nan unfortunate number of ISPs would rather let the spam go through than possibly annoy a customer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\nJust fixed the scripts that create (and update) my <a href=\"http:\/\/zonky.org\/notes\/spam-report\">spam report<\/a>. I decided long ago not to block spam (previously it was difficult to block it properly because of how email was setup; I could properly block it now but it would ruin the report), so I could produce an archive of spam and do some basic analysis on the content. I&#8217;ve been running the report a few years now (the oldest spam in hand dates to roughly June 2003) and it now shows the expected trends &#8230; the number of spams is growing and the size of each spam message is growing (because many these days are image spams).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[449],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it","tag-spam","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1287,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/1287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}