Can SPAM be a good thing?

[legion]

I was just pondering, does the abundance of SPAM shooting across the Internet make it more difficult for hackers to find and intercept "legitimate" traffic?

[widebody911]

Originally posted by legion
I was just pondering, does the abundance of SPAM shooting across the Internet make it more difficult for hackers to find and intercept "legitimate" traffic?

Not really. Packet sniffing isn't the way hacks are done any more. Attacks are more methodical, going one-by-one down an IP range, probing for vulnerabilities and installing bots when found, using said bots to send spam, launch other attacks, etc.

Your analogy is more along the lines of "is there less crime when there is bad weather?"

[legion]

Fair analogy. I also expected to be edumucated.

[masraum]

All of that spam is a bad thing, especially if you count all of the "funny" or "interesting" or "amazing" emails that all of your friends and relatives forward to you and everyone they know. If we could get all of the junk email cut down I have to think that we'd see a difference in the internet either in speed or cost or both.

[Jim Richards]

[jluetjen]

Originally posted by masraum
If we could get all of the junk email cut down I have to think that we'd see a difference in the internet either in speed or cost or both.

Interesting. The company that I used to work for made a critical component for routers and switches -- key parts of the internet infrastructure. Curiously, as of 5 to 7 years ago the internet infrastructure was massively overbuilt, so that the available capacity was exponentially greater then the demand. Admittedly, this wasn't always true in the "last mile" prior to the end user. But the economic result of this over capacity was the expected crash in the industry -- which happened.

I'm not engineer, but my economics background would suggest that I kind of doubt that the reduction in spam is going to make a measurable impact on internet throughput in the global scheme of things. To put it a different way, since the capacity is more then ample, a reduction in demand (ie. spam) will not cause a reduction in price -- since the infrastructure costs will remain the same. It might increase the speed somewhat, but since capacity is not limiting the speed in many cases, it will most likely have less of an impact that you'd hope. I know that I can get emails from the far side of the world (with big attachments) in a matter of seconds to a minute or two, based on a simultaneous telephone conversation. In many cases the biggest delay is my outgoing anti-virus software, or my incoming receive frequency.

[masraum]

Originally posted by jluetjen
Interesting. The company that I used to work for made a critical component for routers and switches -- key parts of the internet infrastructure. Curiously, as of 5 to 7 years ago the internet infrastructure was massively overbuilt, so that the available capacity was exponentially greater then the demand. Admittedly, this wasn't always true in the "last mile" prior to the end user. But the economic result of this over capacity was the expected crash in the industry -- which happened.

I'm not engineer, but my economics background would suggest that I kind of doubt that the reduction in spam is going to make a measurable impact on internet throughput in the global scheme of things. To put it a different way, since the capacity is more then ample, a reduction in demand (ie. spam) will not cause a reduction in price -- since the infrastructure costs will remain the same. It might increase the speed somewhat, but since capacity is not limiting the speed in many cases, it will most likely have less of an impact that you'd hope. I know that I can get emails from the far side of the world (with big attachments) in a matter of seconds to a minute or two, based on a simultaneous telephone conversation. In many cases the biggest delay is my outgoing anti-virus software, or my incoming receive frequency.

Makes sense. I too sometimes get stuff nearly instantly with no attachments and stuff with attachments as you say, in seconds to minutes, and even if the SP didn't have to worry about the same capacity of the email servers, they'd not lower the price and the majority of the price probably does not come from email, but infrastructure.

OK, fine!

Nevermind