Thievery, blackmail, extortion, etc. are all profitable, and yet, I would argue not of value. So is legally tricking people into paying for services they do not want. This is a terrible sentiment that can be used to justify any number of shady dealings. But it's also housed in an incoherent paragraph where the author briefly argues both sides, so I have no idea whether he actually agrees with the above statement or not.
Spam is harmful, plain and simple.
Well, technically littering, graffiti-vandalism, etc is also a crime. In certain cities treated harder than small thefts.
All these loophole-abusers make me really sick. Even if there's no "law" making it "illegal" it doesn't mean you have to abuse every possible loophole there is in the "system" to make some money "legally". If you are going to ignore ethics and cause pain to people anyway just grow some balls and rob a bank instead.
Ethics is not a luxury. Properly defined and applied, what is ethical is what is needed to survive as a human (which means going by reason), long term. This is totally at odds with what spammers do, which is to defraud people, violate contracts, etc. Running or using a bot network is trespass and theft. In this context, everyone, including the spammer, knows where the botnet came from.
Yes, this guy might get some money, for a while, just like any other common criminal can (while constantly worrying about getting caught, long after the crime was committed). But compare that pathetic psychological state and the small, ephemeral trickle of income to what someone doing honest work can earn (a successful startup, for example), and you will see that the immoral is the impractical.
But I submit that "survival" means more than just that. We're human beings, so for us, survival requires independent thought, art, science, honesty, self-esteem, productive work, and a whole lot more.
I'm a little confused by that statement. It doesn't seem like it is blocked.
It appears his old username is/was.
* Automation at the high-end of spamming * Creating a wide a net as possible to pull in visitors
Much like the volume of spam emails is there because the conversion rate is so poor, so many emails get filtered. By using volume as a vector, despite the diminishing returns, spammers aim to get a decent return on their investment.
The marginal cost of email or a new spamblog is low (though email is still by far cheaper). That's the basis for them being so many of them. I know the conversion rate for email is miniscule (but multiplying that by millions can generate a decent sum). No idea about the conversion rate of spam blogs.
The source of income isn't adsense, it's affiliate products, and in those areas. Porn and pills are the one that are profitable.
And yes, spam blogs do work, they work well enough that when Google finds a blog farm and drops them out of the index, spammers take some time to figure out how they got spotted, adjust their approach or make a suitable correction, and start again. The methods of creating spam sites and blogs differ over time, but the general approach is still a core spam technique.
My revenge fantasy is to have spammers serve prison time equal to amount of time they have stolen from their victims i.e. ten seconds a day per victim * 1 million victims sounds about right.
Content tends to be scraped content, sometimes Markov chained or other spinning methods. The content to display is based on keywords.
Depending on the spam website solution, the automation is done on a number of levels (depending on the blogfarm technique):
* WordpressMU with wildcard subdomains based on a spreadsheet of keywords * Automated set up of Blogger blogs (either using Captcha breakers, Mechanical turk, or just asking the user to solve captchas 10 at a time) * Automated publishing of content via XMLRPC (for wordpress and/or blogger), or other interfaces. Then almost always ping-servers are pinged. * Automated creation of websites given a template and a heap of content - sometimes Markoved sometimes spun. Grabbing content either through screen scraping, RSS, text files, anything they can get their hands on. (They tried wikipedia for a while, last time I looked, they were dabbling with Yahoo answers for both content and inbound links) * automated link building. Basically finding fingerprints of known no-rel-follow tools - like Pligg, Wordpress on edu/gov domains etc. Includes automated comment spam to build inbound links.
It does surprise me the lengths the successful spammers go to in blogspam and spam websites. They figure out this is still more profitable than building real long-term value and writing interesting content. Sometimes I think it's one of those "beat Google at it's own game", and the rush of earning quick money.
I was once acquainted with a company that sent unsolicited mail (travel related) through one of those gazillion email databases. When I asked why were they doing it, their response was a blank stare—Well, it gives us a 10 to 1 return on investment each time we do it, why should we stop?.
It's the same reason why it's so difficult to cancel your cable plan, companies notice that if they ask their customers to fax in their contract, cancellation rates diminish to a fraction. Profit!
