Geek News and Musings

As Long As People Keep Buying, Scams (and Spam) Will Keep On Coming
It looks like if anything is going to be able to effectively stop spam, it might be pressure on spammers’ profit margins that makes spamming a less attractive line of work. But that still seems a ways off, as long as enough people continue to buy the stuff being sold in spam messages. Spammers know if they can reach a high enough volume, they’ll find enough suckers to make it worthwhile. Scareware, too, is a volume business: a new report looked at a recent scam in which users were sent to booby-trapped web sites which said their computers had a virus. They were then directed to a site selling them some $50 “anti-virus” software. While a small percentage of people actually ponied up the cash, enough did to allow the scammers to pay more than $10,000 per day to the people who used SEO techniques on keyword typos to drive marks into the scam. It’s easy to say that people shouldn’t be so stupid and fall for the scams, but at the same time, perhaps a bigger issue lurks for the legitimate security software industry: if people can’t distinguish between legitimate warnings from their products and scams, it could be a problem for them.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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As Long As People Keep Buying, Scams (and Spam) Will Keep On Coming
It looks like if anything is going to be able to effectively stop spam, it might be pressure on spammers’ profit margins that makes spamming a less attractive line of work. But that still seems a ways off, as long as enough people continue to buy the stuff being sold in spam messages. Spammers know if they can reach a high enough volume, they’ll find enough suckers to make it worthwhile. Scareware, too, is a volume business: a new report looked at a recent scam in which users were sent to booby-trapped web sites which said their computers had a virus. They were then directed to a site selling them some $50 “anti-virus” software. While a small percentage of people actually ponied up the cash, enough did to allow the scammers to pay more than $10,000 per day to the people who used SEO techniques on keyword typos to drive marks into the scam. It’s easy to say that people shouldn’t be so stupid and fall for the scams, but at the same time, perhaps a bigger issue lurks for the legitimate security software industry: if people can’t distinguish between legitimate warnings from their products and scams, it could be a problem for them.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Selling A Different Kind Of Plastic Disc Will Save The Video Industry?
An industry analyst says that Blu-ray disc sales could help save the home-video business, which is hurting as sales of traditional DVDs drop off. This seems to be at odds with earlier stories, which said that Blu-ray sales were particularly bleak, and weren’t prompting consumers to upgrade their libraries of standard DVDs. Blu-ray continually gets portrayed as some sort of quantum leap in DVD technology, but in reality, it doesn’t look like it offers enough advantages over standard DVDs to tempt large numbers of consumers to buy in at its higher price. Innovative online services — if the movie studios will allow them to emerge — would seem to offer the industry a better chance at salvation, rather than yet another form of locked-down plastic disc at a higher price.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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