spam and carbon emissions

[Martin Hepworth <ma...@gmail.com>]

Interesting article
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16951-spam-tramples-environment-with-huge-carbon-footprint.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
I wonder how they figure out the transmission costs are are doing something
clever with the amount of power used by the routers vs %age of all interweb
traffic that is spam??

-- 
Martin Hepworth
Oxford, UK

Re: spam and carbon emissions

[Justin Mason <jm...@jmason.org>]

I think this was Richi Jennings (http://richi.co.uk/) and McAfee.
maybe some MFE staff on the list might comment? ;)

--j.

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 15:22, Martin Hepworth <ma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting
> article http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16951-spam-tramples-environment-with-huge-carbon-footprint.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
> I wonder how they figure out the transmission costs are are doing something
> clever with the amount of power used by the routers vs %age of all interweb
> traffic that is spam??
>
> --
> Martin Hepworth
> Oxford, UK
>

Re: spam and carbon emissions

[Jesse Stroik <js...@ssec.wisc.edu>]

  > "Interestingly, the majority of energy usage (around 80%) comes from
> users viewing and deleting spam, and searching for legitimate emails 
> within spam filters."

Right -- if your users can't trust their 'spam' folder as spam, then 
what is the point?  They should keep it around so they can check it in 
case they seem to be missing a message, but generally speaking, you 
should get few enough false positives so that the risk of false positive 
for each user is nearly zero.  Then the spam folder is actually useful.

This does mean, however, that you can't assign very high value to some 
of the rules that can often yield false positives such as the BOTNET 
rule which assumes everyone has proper rDNS, etc.

Best,
Jesse

Re: spam and carbon emissions

[Kenneth Porter <sh...@sewingwitch.com>]

--On Wednesday, April 15, 2009 4:22 PM +0100 Martin Hepworth 
<ma...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting article
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16951-spam-tramples-environment-wit
> h-huge-carbon-footprint.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news I wonder how
> they figure out the transmission costs are are doing something clever
> with the amount of power used by the routers vs %age of all interweb
> traffic that is spam??

The Ecological Impact of Spam
<http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/15/1447251>

"Interestingly, the majority of energy usage (around 80%) comes from users 
viewing and deleting spam, and searching for legitimate emails within spam 
filters."