Spammer

As usual, I hate spammers. Spammers are the attention seeker people who waste data transfer, web space, public productivity and create fraud investigation cost. Intelligence wise, spammers with no intention but fun is more annoying.

One of my friends posted this on his status update:
This status is being tracked, the owners of facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for the Haiti earthquake disaster for everytime this is cut and paste as a status. You only have to leave it for a minimum of 1 hour. Lets all do our bit to help - 請把上面的文字 copy/paste 到你的現況分享並至少保留一個小時, FB 會統計這些發布的現況, 每一則現況 FB 會相對捐出美金一元給海地地震救災基金

The first thing that came to my mind was with what algorithm do they keep track of the message? The simplest one I can think of is string comparison, but what is the key word for it? Haiti earthquake? $1 to rescue fund? or the whole sentence? Short string doesn't seem to be good. There was an article of twitter and Facebook users comparison, and if my memory doesn't fail me, there is about 222 million of Facebook users. Assume that 1% of the Facebook users occasionally update their status. I doubt the probability of short string resemblance out of 2.2 million status is insignificant, not to mention new status is occassionally being created by the 2.2 million and Haiti earthquake is the hot search in Google. Whole sentence doesn't make any real sense too. The time and cost to do the search is high. Or Facebook probably can invent some AI tools which are smart enough to understand the meaning of the sentence and to verify the sentence.

After long thought, it came to my mind the most basic thing. Why would Facebook actually give out $1 for the status update regarding Haiti? It was so dumb of me to actually analyze the tracking without putting that into consideration. Even if Facebook would, Facebook would definitely make an official note.

I don't dislike the people who just follow and put that message in their status. Everyone wishes to help the Haitian. I dislike the one who created this status. What is the point of making a false claim and mislead people into the belief and hope that their status might add some fund for the Haiti earthquake? For fun? To see the effect of the status on influencing people? It's okay to play around, but why play with misfortune and disaster.

PS: The spammer should probably take a lesson in his/her Chinese first. FYI, copy/paste is 複製 and FB is 面書 (well, at least to Hongkies and taiwanese).