The question here is which one has a greater negative overall societal/economic impact. For the purposes of this thread, I’ll include worms and Trojan Horses under the virus umbrella.
Spam:
Takes up network bandwith. Wastes the recipients’ time. Nearly impossible to escape.
Virus:
Takes up network bandwidth. Destroys data. But it seems that one can be reasonably well-protected against them.
I am now leaning towards thinking of spam as being the worse of the two, but that’s probably just due to the amount of time I spent trying to actively de-spam while the SDMB was on hiatus. Also, given the nature of the question, maybe it really belongs in GD, but I have a feeling there are going to be few pro-spam or pro-virus voices out there, so it’s here for now.
Viruses can be avoided with common sense and a little information. Spam is inescapable. So I’d say that spam is worse, mainly because it’s the only one that ever gets me.
My system had a virus once, and it was due entirely to brief carelessness on my part. Lesson learned, life goes on.
Spam arrives whether or not you’re careful. The only defense is leaving a strewn and broken trail of discarded e-mail addresses behind you, and that’s no defense at all, that’s defeat. Spam is more of a virus than any virus is, it’s a plague.
So, er, I vote for spam as being worse. I might not have made that clear enough.
Both can be fairly well controlled with filters and anti-virus software. However the consequences of letting one spam through is small, one virus can bring down your computer system and cause huge costs in time and equipment. Anti-virus software is far from 100% effective. Many viruses are written to try to evade this software, and anti-virus software is mostly effective for viruses that have been found and analyzed. What if you are among one of the first people to “find” a new virus.
Also look at how much bandwith and computer time (not to mention expense) is used by anti-virus software. My software checks all webpages and sometimes slows my computer to a crawl. I would love to be able to live without. Anti-spam filters only need to run when new e-mail is received.
Well, that’s just the question. A virus can have catastrophic consequences for a relatively small number of people (I think – or hope, anyway), whereas while the consequences of each piece of spam may be small, I’d think that the cumulative effects of all the messages sent and all the people who have to receive them unwillingly are rather large.
The way I understand spam filters to work, messages are only removed after they’ve reached your server, so the pipelines are still getting clogged. Your point on antivirus software placing an additional burden on your computer is well taken, though I can only say that my experience hasn’t been like that.
I’d vote for spam as well. Viruses can be blocked by a combination of maintaining your software and using common sense. Of course, not everyone has common sense, but everyone who uses my computer does!
(One of my admin’s once sent an email to the company asking “If someone you don’t know has sent you a file you don’t recognize and didn’t ask for, why on earth would you open it?” Virus creators have gotten a little more devious since, but not much.)
I have two reasons for saying spam is a worse plague. One is all the reasons previously mentioned - can’t avoid it, uses time and resources that could be better spent, etc. The other is the impact that I think spam has on the net. Email has been described as the killer app for the net. Spam could be the death of the killer app. I can protect my children/business/friends from viruses, but I can’t protect them from spam. My only means of protection is to limit, or eliminate, use.
Don’t want your kids reading porno spam? Don’t let them have an account, join web sites, post to forums.
Don’t want your company overwhelmed with junk mail? Limit use to company business only, block sites, adopt restrictive email policies.
Don’t want your friends getting spam? Don’t use evite, hotmail, etc.
Spam’s not just bad for what it is, but for what it does.
Spam is much much worse. The time it takes to clean it up is much longer than maintaining one’s high protection level against viruses. It causes more computer crashes than viruses (via 90-window browser pop-ups). The fact that governments are doing very little about it emboldens the spammers. What current anti-spam laws are inteh books, spammers treat these current law as jokes, taking mandatory ‘remove me’ lists to sell them to other spammers.
Since most of the responses here think spam is a worse problem than viruses, then why do I get the feeling that the broadcast media devote so much more attention to the latter? Perhaps it’s just the nature of news reporting that occasional flare-ups such as Nimda make better press than the daily throbbing, numbing pain of spam, but I think at least one reason that more hasn’t been done against spam is because it doesn’t get as much coverage as viruses.
SPAM! At least most viruses are preventable and/or curable. SPAM is like a cold (though that 's caused by a virus), can’t cure it can only treat it after you get it…
