Spam and Globalisation
Posted on May 28, 2007 in Information Theory | Comments (0)
One of the more interesting about the globalisation of the workforce is the globalisation of spam. I am not talking about just email spam or trackback spam. I am talking about all forms of spam.
One way to deal with spammers is to raise the cost of sending a spam. Going global means that economics of spam change significantly. It of course started with the lower cost of a server farm in China. Email spammers quickly flocked to China to lower their operational cost. It's not just hardware either. The human labor costs are far lower. My online business directory about 60 human spam entries a day. I know they are human because I have turned up the CAPTCHA to cartoony, yet human generated spam still comes in. There really isn't as solution for this particular problem of globalisation. An Indian or Chinese spammer has a far lower cost structure and he can employ human labor at a far lower cost. This means that spam is going to continue unabated and quite frankly is going to get worse! 99.9% of all submissions of all submissions to my online business directory are complete garbage. I turned off the forum at Earlymiser because of the huge number of spam submissions. I turned on Typekey authentication on this blog because of spam. It's not just the automated bot submissions but the human spam drives me nuts. Because you can hire a human being in some third world countries for a few hundred dollars a month, the problem is never really going to go away.
