The amount of borderline harassment I get about my Google Drive being almost full is shocking.
They have really amped up the ferocity of the language they're using to try and extract money from you for Drive. No wonder spammers are copying that.
It hasn't moved since.
Thankfully they do have the means to change the wording of the emails I can't unsubscribe from. I don't know what the official reason is but the result is I have to modify my filters.
Apple are no better. Choose between a permanent nag notification on Settings, my most trusted app, or disabling backup of all the negligibly-sized data.
Are you sure it’s not the other way around?
[0] https://siliconangle.com/2023/12/19/new-report-warns-rise-ai...
You want to send me an email? Please give me $1 first, and if I don't like your content I can, without notice, change that number to $50 per email.
I pay for email via Fastmail, don't really have a spam problem. I think this addresses your point above, that to have an effective spam filter takes money, and free email doesn't generate money.
I pay for search via Kagi, don't see all those crappy Google Ads and actually get useful search.
I can see the other services (socials, messaging) moving to a paid model to solve the same issues.
LLMs are interesting for phishing as they allow personalisation. Spam is no longer, well exactly the Monty Python meaning.
Because of my work I investigated a lot of spam, and I discovered real life identities of senders in many cases (because of horrible or no exostent opsec). Most of them were either underage, lived in third world countries, or both.
I saw someone fall for one recently where a scammer had created a fake announcement from an email sending company stating they were adding political messages to the bottom of your sent emails, and to log in to opt out. The look and feel of the email was pretty much perfect.
Yes, I'm looking at you Teal HQ, you're spamming us even 3 months after deleting our accounts.
Scammers started using LLMs to write fishing emails, then scammers started generating images, then they started using AI to vibe code it. Its just a natural progression.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47435156, we can know that India has a ~70% positive view on AI. While scammers likely didn't fill out the survey, it shows the general view on AI from where most scammers work from and live.
Got any citation on that? From what I've seen, the vaat majority of scams are targeted at other Indians. The government runs a significant number of cyber awareness programs nowadays; don't think they appreciate scammers.
"AI" companies are responsible for this mess. They should be held accountable for digging us out of it.
Even if it's not the only they can do.
I suspect it's the only reasonable advice now?
If someone calls from an unknown number, they get some sort of captcha to prove that they are a human, or they matter is important.
For example, the message should say that, if you are geniune, then please call again after 1 minute..
The tricky part for scammers is there is no good answer here, if you claim to be a plumber and the victim hasn't booked a plumber, they won't answer.
I think as agents become more pervasive, there will be an arms race of ecosystems to screen them out.
This changes, of course, with phishing. Will phishing by email even survive when voice imitation calls become more and more available? I guess it will, the bar for monetization is too low bar with resellable accounts and the like.
I too suffer from this, and one thing that has been increasingly annoying to deal with, even worse than spam imo, is the cold outreach campaigns from software vendors, recruiters, marketers, etc.
I get so many of them that I am now getting to a point of considering writing my own rules engine to filter the noise, it's infuriating.
I’d even say all vibe-coded slop is spam as soon as anybody else than the original perpetrator has to read it.
Recently reported nearly 200 firebase accounts to google, haven't gotten any since
