|
| Recent
Articles |
Can't Fix Stupid, But Congress Will Try
First let's echo Ron White when he says, "you can't fix stupid." Now that we agree on that, let's also doubt that imposing stiffer penalties on those stupid enough to post video evidence on YouTube of themselves...
UN Will Not Control The Internet
The new head of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Hamadoun Toure has no new plans to change the oversight of the Internet. He currently supports the two major agencies ICANN and the ITU...
E-Government Sites Stagnant
Satisfaction with federal government Web sites rose slightly in the fourth quarter of 2006. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index or ACSI out...
Debunking
Matt Cutts
The Google Toolbar doesn't fuel Google's index, nor is Google working hand in
hand with the Central Intelligence Agency, even if Google did buy Keyhole, once
backed by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm. You can't...
Austin Paper Offers Blogs To Local Politicos
The Austin American-Statesman has an open offer to host blogs for candidates for office from the area. Candidates range in aspiration from county clerk offices to that of Governor or the US House of Representatives.
FTC
Busts Online Realtors On Antitrust Case
The Austin Board of Realtors found itself on the receiving end of the Federal
Trade Commission's ire due to the FTC's contention the Multiple Listing Service
(MLS) used by the Board blocked the marketing of certain listings...
|
|
|
|
02.13.07
US Spends $130 Million Daily On Spam
 By David A. Utter
If the CEO wants to know how to save some money from being wasted each day, tell her the best people she can pressure aren't the employees, but the company's federal Congressmen.
Forget about gathering all the staff in one room and telling them how they are money-sucking time wasters. The problem may not be their fault. Spam could be to blame.
The Royal Pingdom blog takes the higher estimate of spam appearing in inboxes – the 94 percent figure cited by Postini – in determining how much spam may be costing employers:
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average hourly salary is $18.21. Based on that, one minute of a worker’s time is worth just over $0.30. This means that for every minute lost for those 86 million workers, $26.1 million goes down the drain. In one year, 260 work days, that amounts to almost $6.8 billion.
However, just one lost minute per day on average is not realistic. Let us assume that the average lost time at work due to spam is five minutes per day. This gives us $130.5 million per day, or $33.9 billion per year.
A lot of management of the spam problem can be done at the gateway of a network. Plenty of companies are out there who will take a firm's money to help with this.
But that's a mitigating workaround, not a true solution. If we are going to see a cleanup in spam, we need the US Government to put significant pressure on the countries where a lot of the spammers and bot-herders reside.
These are criminal rings operating in sophisticated ways, not just a couple of guys throwing stuff into a bunch of Usenet groups.
Spam may not be a completely solvable problem, since the financial incentive to spam will exist as long as people are dumb enough to buy and invest based on something that lands in the inbox. But there's no reason the bigger operations can't be greeted in the early morning hours by gun-toting authorities wielding arrest warrants.
About the Author:
David A. Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
|
