[Mailman-Users] Bogus/forged subscription attempts: request for comments and possibly data
Stephen J. Turnbull
stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Jun 10 16:16:34 CEST 2014
Perry E. Metzger writes:
> have been significant academic studies of the market, and they
> indicate that your portrayal isn't accurate.
I was incautious; "smart" spammers go back at least to Canter and
Siegel. What I should have written was "spammers are greedy, but many
aren't too smart."
I don't do such studies myself, but my colleagues do a lot of those
studies for various markets. What those studies invariably show is
that (1) the most profitable businesses generally are reasonably smart
-- getting to the top may have been a matter of luck but staying there
takes work and some smarts, and (2) there is usually a large fringe of
"noise traders", agents who are doing pretty random things. Some of
the latter can get big enough to be noticed before their bubbles
burst.
> I would presume that if you don't understand what they're doing, it
> isn't because it is completely irrational, but rather because you
> don't get exactly what they're attempting.
That's possible. Nevertheless I suspect that there are quite a few
out there who are doing things that make sense only to themselves and
will disappear in unprofitability (although some may be deliberately
random, as in "fuzzer"-style software testing).
Either way, though, some spammer behavior is inexplicable and it's
probably not worth trying too hard to figure it out.
Steve
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