Declan Chellar December 21st, 2007
It used to be that I didn’t have enough porn and my penis was too small.
Now, apparently, those aren’t a problem any more and since I haven’t noticed any physical changes lately, I supposed standards of measurement have changed. These days, I don’t have enough drugs, according to spam comments sent to my ballog and spam sent to my e-mail address*.
I had a poke around the interweb to see if I could find out how much spam costs businesses every year. Janine Warner says the cost is in the order of billions of US$ annually in computer processing alone. Information Week reported in 2005 that the annual cost of loss of productivity in the USA alone was $21.58 billion. That was roughly the entire GDP of Nicaragua.
According to an article on The Register from June 2006, 64% of spam servers are based in Taiwan and 23% are in the USA (research done by a company called Ciphertrust). That’s not to say that the spammers themselves are Taiwanese or American, but that they use equipment and services in those countries. Countries which are not doing a lot to shut down those services and equipment.
The World Bank’s global GDB figures for 2006 state that the USA’s GDP in that year was $13,201,819,000,000 representing 19.75% of the whole world’s GDP of $66,822,997,000,000.
Assuming the cost of spam to US productivity applies proportionately to the whole world, then $21,580,000,000 is 19.75% of $109,266,000,000. That rounds down to $109 billion worldwide. If Ciphertrust are to be believed, the USA is responsible for $25 billion of that and Taiwan is responsible for $70 billion. How come the UN isn’t issuing sanctions?
Spam is kind of like TV advertising. Everyone I know changes channel as soon as the ads come on and everyone I know deletes spam. However, someone out there must be following spam links and actually buying the crap otherwise the spammers would have given up long ago. That guy must spend his whole life in his house, high on pharmaceuticals, yanking so hard on his newly enlarged member while looking at gigabytes of porn that he shakes the strap loose on his fake Rolex.
Step 1: find that guy and bitch-slap him.
Step 2: find the spammers and castrate them.
Step 3: get the governments of the world, particularly Taiwan and the USA to shut down those servers.
* I don’t use my personal e-mail address to register on any websites. That means one of my stupid friends got a virus or trojan on their computer which picked out my e-mail from their address book. If I find out who you are, you’re off my Christmas list. Gobshite.