A recent message contained the following in a context that had something
to do with bandwidth:
In urban areas, in developed countries, you *might* continue to
see the increase in bandwidth that you are talking about. But I
know a lot of people who's internet connections in the past 10
years have increased by a stunning 2x. (28.8 to 56). And that's in
the U.S.. Please think globally.
My daughter has a fifth grade classmate who spends 15-20 minutes
during lunch break cleaning the spam out of her in-box--every day.
And she's not the only one doing it. Do you think those email
accounts are going to be useable by the time they graduate from
high school?
15 minutes at 28.8 kbit/sec is enough to move about 3 MBytes of
uncompressed or incompressible data. It's also enough to move more
than 1000 modest but not tiny spam of 2 KBytes each or 60 unusually
large 50 KByte messages. A lot of spam has far more SMTP headers than
its 200 or 300 bytes of body consisting of URLs and hashbusting strings.
That student's 15-20 minutes/day spent on has nothing to do with
network bandwidth, but human attention and thinking.
Years ago I flogged the "postage due" bit about spam. I stopped,
because it's broken. It's not whatever you want to call "broadband"
this week that invalidated it, but mere 28 kbit/sec modems. The
computer costs per user to process spam are trivial and will remain
trivial, except in unusual cases. One typical web page of 30-50 KBytes
is several times the average size of spam. Only when the cost of
bandwidth is so high that the world wide web is too expensive to use
are the computer costs of spam significant for an individual user.
It is only when you have many users that bandwidth, CPU cycles, and
disk space spent on spam are significant.
The costs of spam are in those 15-20 minutes blocks of human attention.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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