According to a recent report from Internet security firm Kaspersky, India is currently the number one country in the world when it comes to generating spam email. According to Kasperksy, in the third quarter of last year, spam accounted for about 79.8% of email traffic, and the top three countries responsible for generating it were India at 14.8%, Indonesia at 10.6%, and Brazil at 9.7%. This is a little bit up from a reported low point this summer, and India might be to blame.

According to computer security juggernaut Symantec (makers of Norton Antivirus) global spam levels are the lowest they’ve been since 2008, when a particularly notorious spam center was taken offline. Worldwide, spam is now down to only 1 in 1.37 emails and only 73.7 percent of emails as a whole. Yes, that’s right. This is considered a low-point.

While there is clearly still a remarkable spam presence on the Internet, some of the current lull could be attributed to progress in taking down the largely automated networks responsible for spending it. Not to mention, spam filters are getting better and by this point, most Internet users understand what spam is and how to effectively avoid it. There’s also no telling what percentage of these recorded spam emails are being sent to largely inactive, or disposable accounts.

Since it’s their job to protect customers from the darkest spawn of the Web, the brave, possibly foolhardy researchers at F-Secure decided to simply buy a bunch of products advertised in spam e-mails and see what happened. Though we don’t recommend that you try this at home, the results were not what you might expect:

While doing some spam research a couple of years ago, we did a series of test purchases from spam e-mails.

We bought pills, software, cigarettes, et cetera. We were a bit surprised that almost all of the orders went through and actually delivered goods. Sure, the Windows CD we got was a poor clone and the Rolex was obviously fake, but at least they sent us something.

We were carefully watching the credit card accounts we created for our tests but we never saw any fraudulent use of them.

The most surprising outcome from this test was that we didn’t see more spam to the e-mail addresses we used to order the goods.

They offer this sad addendum, however: “P.S. We never actually got the Rolex we ordered. It was stopped and confiscated by local customs as a pirated product. They ended up destroying it. With a hammer.”

See also: This new study on the worldwide spam business. [pdf]

(F-Secure via Marginal Revolution)

When logging into a website or establishing a new account, many users are prompted to decipher a visually distorted string of letters and numbers to keep spammers from gaining access. This list of characters is a CAPTCHA, a puzzle that is glaringly easy for most humans but that stops computers from automatically deciphering the text. CAPTCHAs also come in audio form for the visually impaired, but these audio puzzles are an easy target for would-be spammers.

An audio CAPTCHA is a list of letters or numbers read along with additional audio distortion. The user has to list the characters correctly to gain access like with a regular visual CAPTCHA. A team of researchers from Stanford University, led by Elie Bursztein, has developed an algorithm that can automatically defeat audio CAPTCHAs. The ability to automatically solve CAPTCHA puzzles would allow spammers to create new accounts and thus even more spam.

Since 2002, a man named Daniel Balsam has made a career out of suing companies that send spam messages via email. Formerly a marketer, Balsam quit his job, went to law school, and has since made “well in excess of $1 million in court judgments and lawsuit settlements with companies accused of sending illegal spam.”

Yesterday, SpaceX became the first private company to successfully launch a spacecraft into orbit and then guide it back to Earth. Propelled by a Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule circled the Earth twice and landed unharmed in the Pacific. At yesterday’s press conference following the mission’s success, CEO Elon Musk revealed that it had carried a secret payload the whole time, but he wouldn’t say what it was, only that “if you like Monty Python, you’ll love the secret.” This led some to speculate that it was Spam. But it wasn’t:

A day after Ping, Apple’s music-only social network, launched, it’s already plagued with things unrelated to music, namely spam.

Though Ping has a fairly easy feature to report offensive content, Apple seemed to forget that this is the Internet. Like I mentioned, there really didn’t seem to be a way to enforce the music-only barrier of Ping, which has already been breached by run-of-the-mill internet spammers who got the ball rolling with the infamous “free iPhone” spam.

CAPTCHA, or those boxes of distorted text that appear on many websites before you perform key functions like commenting or editing wikis, may be annoying for users to deal with, but they’re a partial shield against a web dominated by spam. As their full name — “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” — implies, they’re still pretty good at evading solution by bots. Here’s the problem: Humans can still solve them for nefarious ends, and many spammers have discovered that there’s a labor market of people who are willing to do so for dirt cheap.

Happy Japanese Kirby, angry American Kirby (Game Revolution)

Laver’s law of fashion (37Signals)

Making bacon by bakin’ (Bacon Today)

Analyzing StarCraft II‘s ranking system (Sirlin)

Pacey-Con 2010 (Rillawafers)

Composite photo of 30 meter tombstoning plunge (news.com.au)

The Watchmen Test (Bleeding Cool)

(title image via Pearl’s Sentimental Journey; h/t Copyranter)

On May 3, 1978, the Internet witnessed a glorious and not particularly welcome birth: The first ever spam email. Gary Thuerk, a marketer for the Digital Equipment Corporation, blasted out his message to 400 of the 2600 people on ARPAnet, the DARPA-funded so-called “first Internet.” Naturally: He was selling something. (Computers, or more specifically, information about open houses where people could check out the computers.) He annoyed a lot of people. And he also had some success, with a few recipients interested in what he was pushing. And thus, spam was born.