Eegads! Some computer scientists in Berkeley and San Diego, CA have 28 prime new candidates for the Darwin Disk.
What’s the Darwin Disk, you ask? Why, it’s a disk long ago proposed by this newsletter containing the names of people who respond to penis-enlargement, pharmaceutical, work-at-home and other spam, thereby identifying themselves as so stupid they should be removed from the Internet’s e-mail gene pool.
The disk could be given to spammers so they could target the idiots and leave the rest of us alone.
The 28 new Darwin Disk nominees come as the results of a study done by computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and UC San Diego attempting to quantify the effectiveness of spam campaigns.
The researchers, led by UC Berkeley professor Stefan Savage, infiltrated a bot-net and had responders diverted to some dummy Web sites they had set up.
The study documented three spam campaigns consisting of 469 million e-mails. According to the researchers, they documented how many of the e-mails were delivered, how many were filtered and how many recipients clicked through.
The researchers counted any respondent who made it to the dummy sites’ purchase page as a conversion.
In one campaign, 350 million pharmaceutical spams resulted in 28 conversions, a conversion rate of 0.00001%. Also, all but one of the conversions were for penis-enlargement pills, according to the study.
However, the study monitored less than 1.5% of the Storm bot-network, so the researchers estimated it probably generates between $7,000 and $9,500 in revenue per day or about $3.5 million per year.
Conclusions: Male Internet users are far more likely candidates for the Darwin Disk than female users and many of these men believe they are so lacking in the love-pump department, they will respond to come-ons such as “Her pinky wet grotto for love” (real), “Stimulate love toy growth. (real), and “2 inches changes life perfectly (also real).
Way to go, guys.
