Trivia from the MIT Spam Conference

MIT held its 2005 Spam Conference last week. Some interesting talks, with new ideas. Some mad-sounding, academic ideas that would never work in the real world. Unfortunately some boring, unoriginal, or marketing-driven ones too.

Some interesting trivia:

• There are  600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to mis-spell Viagra
• About 5% of web traffic appears to be spammers harvesting email addresses
• On average, spammers take about 10 days to send spam to a newly-harvested address
• At one point, an audience member asked, "If the opposite of Spam is Ham, what's the opposite of Phish?" Quick as a flash, the answer came back... "Phowl."