Laurence 'Green Card' Canter Has No Regrets

Normally... by ackthpt · 2002-03-26 01:24 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Normally I don't feel anyone should burn in hell, but he's up there with Hitler as far as I'm concerned. But, I suppose if they hadn't started it, some other cretin would have. Still, all spammers have earned my eternal ire.

--

A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar

Re:Normally... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:30 · Score: 0

He sent a bit of spam. Get over it. Comparing him with Hitler just makes you look like an ignorant prick.
Re:Normally... by Horne-fisher · 2002-03-26 01:34 · Score: 1

all spammers have earned my eternal ire.

I know what you mean; my 'good' (read, non-yahoo) email address is administered through the University I attend, and, as I use a Unix based mail client, I cannot block addresses. I try to combat the negative effects by never giving this address to anyone but people I know, but I still get spammed.

It doesn't help that the University seems to be selling a list of its addresses.

As a matter of oddish trivia, the weirdest spam I ever recieved had the subject line 'Make Yourself More Attractive to Men' and had to do with the increase of one's bust size.

I'm male.

Very straight.

Funny?
Re:Normally... by Laglorden · 2002-03-26 01:43 · Score: 1

...I would object to someone comparing a group of people to Hitler, but not in this case...

If I sometime meet someone who say they work with mass-mailing others I will spit them straight in the face and not care about the consequences...

I really, really, really hate spammers!!!
Re:Normally... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:44 · Score: 0

Procmail
Re:Normally... by reynaert · 2002-03-26 01:44 · Score: 5, Informative

as I use a Unix based mail client, I cannot block addresses.
On Unix, filtering mail is normally done by Procmail, not by your mail client. See this excellent tutorial.
Re:Normally... by Megs · 2002-03-26 01:46 · Score: 1

I'm male.
Very straight.
Funny?
No, not really.
Your average spammer doesn't seem to be making any effort to discriminate by sex, much less sexual orientation, among their marks. Makes sense, since they usually just have wads of addresses with no information about the addressees.
I get sex-inappropriate spam every time I flush my hotmail account. Today it was "Urgent information for all men" and two herbal Viagras.
Happily, my university addess gets NO spam.
Meghan

--
Ask me about LOOM(TM).
Re:Normally... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:47 · Score: 0

AFAIK Hitler didn't kill people (if we don't count suicide), it's his soldiers who killed people.
Re:Normally... by Mark+Round · 2002-03-26 01:54 · Score: 1

Ask me about Loom(TM).

Ok. Tell me about Loom(TM)! Are you by any chance referring to the classic LucasArts game?
Re:Normally... by Pete+(big-pete) · 2002-03-26 01:55 · Score: 3, Informative

Once you've learned how to use procmail, you may want to use the Spam Stopper perl script you can download from one of my friend's website.

Very nifty spam stopper indeed.

NB: Sorry Andy! If you get slashdotted, I'll buy you some beer!

-- Pete.

--
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Re:Normally... by arivanov · 2002-03-26 01:59 · Score: 2

Not really. Like any other "brilliant idea" it would have come to other "ingenious minds" as well.

He actually suggested tagging comercials and other stuff which speaks in his favour. He also acknowledges the inherent right of the individual to filter out what he does not like. This does not even compare to the current b***. They declare any filtering to be a violation of their right of free speach. If they send you an ad on P*** Enlargement by 27 inch you must read it!!!

--
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Re:Normally... by Horne-fisher · 2002-03-26 02:10 · Score: 1

Thanks for the advice, I'd considered using Procmail, but the Network adminstrators are not happy with that idea.
Re:Normally... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:15 · Score: 0

Neither did Bin Laden, Charles Manson or Bill Gates. Your point being...?
Re:Normally... by delcielo · 2002-03-26 02:31 · Score: 4, Funny

Here here.

A lawyer AND a spammer. He's got two strikes. On more and he's out.

--
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Re:Normally... by Tackhead · 2002-03-26 02:36 · Score: 2

> A lawyer AND a spammer. He's got two strikes. On more and he's out.
From the article:
There have been times when I've gotten an unsolicited e-mail ad that was of interest to me. I happened to read it, and perhaps responded to it. But it's a very small percentage.

He replies to spam. If we're lucky, he'll get cancer and respond to an ad for laetrile. Strike three, and chalk one up for natural selection.
Re:Normally... by i_want_you_to_throw_ · 2002-03-26 02:47 · Score: 1

SHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! don't tell him... oh great!
Re:Normally... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:49 · Score: 0

Larry Ellison probably killed somebody.

His company was a leader in the promotion and sale of vapourware. And he sexually harasses women who work for his company, then fires them when he breaks up with them.

He's a dirty mean fucker, and makes Bill Gates look like a cub scout in comparison.

Steven Jobs sells coke. Him and the Woz sold stolen long distance time to fund the start of Apple Computer.

But you bunched Bill Gates up there with Manson and Bin Laden for some reason.
Re:Normally... by yatest5 · 2002-03-26 03:04 · Score: 1

Normally I don't feel anyone should burn in hell, but he's up there with Hitler as far as I'm concerned.

Are you *sure*? As a Jew, I am horribly offended by your thoughtless turn of phrase.
--
- Mod parent up! [a] by Anonymous Coward (Score:5) Thurs, June 31, @13:37
Re:Normally... by ebbomega · 2002-03-26 03:19 · Score: 2

Hitler was in WWI. I don't see why he wouldn't have killed anybody.

--
Karma: Non-Heinous
Re:Normally... by slamb · 2002-03-26 03:23 · Score: 2
On Unix, filtering mail is normally done by Procmail, not by your mail client.
Not only that, but that's the best way to filter your mail anywhere. Since so many people access their email from several different places, filtering on the client side is not effective. Also, if you have different quotas in different folders (Cyrus IMAP servers for example), you want to make sure the filtering happens as soon as the mail arrives.
You can do server-side filtering with all the servers I've used:
- Unix mboxes in /var/mail. procmail, as you said. (Or qmail's deliver. Or...)
- Cyrus IMAP without even a Unix account on the server. It has something called Sieve which they want to become an Internet standard. (With eventual support for creating sieve rules graphically in lots of different mail clients.)
- Microsoft Exchange. As much as I hate Exchange (we use it at work), it's only fair to mention it can do it as well. Outlook's "Rules Wizard" will tell you if a given rule can be performed on the server or not.
Re:Normally... by Speed+Racer · 2002-03-26 03:34 · Score: 1

That looks pretty cool but it sounds just like Tagged Message Delivery Agent (TMDA). Is there any difference?

--
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
Re:Normally... by C_nemo · 2002-03-26 03:38 · Score: 1

aaahhhh! Godwins Law, now the spammers have won!
Re:Normally... by jgerman · 2002-03-26 03:46 · Score: 2

It's your right to be offended just as it's his right to say what he wants and my thought not to give a damn about either one of you.

--
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Re:Normally... by yatest5 · 2002-03-26 03:51 · Score: 1

Thankyou for granting us our rights oh wise one.

In case you don't realise, I'm being sarcastic, you dumb fuck.
--
- Mod parent up! [a] by Anonymous Coward (Score:5) Thurs, June 31, @13:37
Re:Normally... by Pete · 2002-03-26 03:52 · Score: 1

He actually suggested tagging comercials and other stuff which speaks in his favour.

I don't think that speaks in his favour at all, actually. It just shows that he's yet another one of those that absolutely does not get it with regard to unsolicited commercial or bulk email. They shouldn't be sending this stuff at all. Legislation as he describes would only have the effect of legitimising spam.
He's thinking of things purely on his own pissweak little level. All he's thinking of is something that'll make it easier for him to filter out the shit. Three hundred a day? Big f*cking deal. How would he like three thousand a day? Hell, how about thirty thousand a day... of which maybe a dozen or so are legitimate messages?
At that level, it doesn't matter if you can filter on a subject line (which you'd never be able to anyway, no spammer would obey such a law, even if they happened to live in a region subject to it), your ISP is paying for that traffic which means you will be paying for it. How would you feel about paying money to receive traffic that you never asked for, don't want and will never even see?
More to the point, how would that pathetic piece of quasi-human filth Cantor feel?
He also acknowledges the inherent right of the individual to filter out what he does not like.

How generous of him :). I wonder if he's willing to acknowledge the right of individuals to control their own property (eg. their computer and network resources) too?
Anyway, always remember rule number 1: Spammers lie. Also make a note of rule number 2: If you think a spammer may be telling the truth, see rule number 1.
Pete.
PS. Sorry if I sounded a bit aggressive above - it wasn't really directed at you, arivanov. As you can probably guess, I can get just a bit irritated about spam. :)
Re:Normally... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 04:06 · Score: 0

What the hell do they have to do with anything? Install it yourself, in your home directory. Sounds to me like someone is just lazy and thinks "Unix sucks because it doesn't have mail filtering" is a good excuse.
Re:Normally... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 04:45 · Score: 0

Defending a spammer means you deserve no better than him.

Eat shit and die, spammer!
Re:Normally... by Megs · 2002-03-26 08:47 · Score: 1

Ok. Tell me about Loom(TM)! Are you by any chance referring to the classic LucasArts game?
Yep, that sure was a classic. By the time I played it the second time with my cousins I had so many post-its and bits of paper with spells scribbled all over them.
Cobb, the wearer of the button in the Secret of Monkey Island which reads "Ask me about LOOM(TM), has a whole spiel about it when you ask, ending by urging you to buy it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if LucasArts still offers it for sale; the last time I looked at their website they hardly admitted they had ever done anything but Star Wars. You can find it on abandonware sites, though.
Bringing this post around to a semblance of on-topicness, Cobb, unlike Laurence Canter, won't make his pitch to you unless you ask :)
Meghan

--
Ask me about LOOM(TM).
Re:Normally... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 08:49 · Score: 0

Wow. First post and Godwin's Rule has been invoked.
Re:Normally... by jgerman · 2002-03-26 08:52 · Score: 2

Then quit your bitching and moaning about what other people post. Instead of putting someone down for comments they make.

--
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Re:Normally... by arivanov · 2002-03-26 10:35 · Score: 2

Sorry if I sounded a bit aggressive above - it wasn't really directed at you, arivanov. As you can probably guess, I can get just a bit irritated about spam.

So do I. I am one of those sad souls that does a whois every SPAM they get and chases the case down as far as possible (taking info out of the BGP table about upstream ISPs if need be).

After reading this interview the guy looks relatively tame compared to the current generation of jerks. Just my 2p.

--
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Re:Normally... by Pete+(big-pete) · 2002-03-26 21:36 · Score: 1

Yeah - it seems like the same sort of thing. The policy is the same - to deny all incoming mail that isn't explicitly allowed. It's the only way to combat spam though unfortunately.

-- Pete.

--
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS

It was inevitable by CProgrammer98 · 2002-03-26 01:25 · Score: 2, Interesting

I guess we shouldn't be too hard on this guy. If he hadn't "invented" spam, lots of others would have. It was inevitable. We have to resign ourselves to the fact that it's just part of life on the net. I don't think any amount of legislation or technology will ever totally eradicate spam, it's here to stay.
.

--
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5

Re:It was inevitable by Profane+Motherfucker · 2002-03-26 01:30 · Score: 0

Right fucking on! There's this prissy attitude that "oh, if only he had never done that, people would have never figured it out." Well, here's my fucking comment: If one cockfaced lawyer can figure it out, a bunch of computer dorks can figure it out. Pretty fucking simple.
Re:It was inevitable by why-is-it · 2002-03-26 02:28 · Score: 2

I guess we shouldn't be too hard on this guy. If he hadn't "invented" spam, lots of others would have. It was inevitable

Perhaps, but he was the first, and has absolutely no remorse or regret about his actions. Quite the contrary - when asked whether he currently sends SPAM he replies:

I haven't been, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't at some time.

Bastard!

--
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Re:It was inevitable by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:59 · Score: 0

I guess we shouldn't be too hard on this guy. If he hadn't murdered the guy, lots of others would have. It was inevitable. We have to resign ourselves to the fact that it's just part of life in the world. I don't think any amount of legislation or technology will ever totally eradicate murder, it's here to stay.

I guess we shouldn't be too hard on this guy. If he hadn't smoked a doob, lots of others would have. It was inevitable. We have to resign ourselves to the fact that it's just part of life. I don't think any amount of legislation or technology will ever totally eradicate drugs, it's here to stay.

I guess we shouldn't be too hard on this guy. If he hadn't slept with that 15 year old, lots of others would have. It was inevitable. We have to resign ourselves to the fact that it's just part of life. I don't think any amount of legislation or technology will ever totally eradicate statutory rape, it's here to stay.
Re:It was inevitable by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 08:18 · Score: 0

Thats like saying "if that guy who shot John Lennon hadn't done it, someone else would, so we shouldn't be so hard on him."

Are you defending John Lennon's killer?

Because thats what it sounds like to me, bitch.
Re:It was inevitable by nurightshu · 2002-03-26 20:36 · Score: 1, Offtopic

Are you defending John Lennon's killer?

If he's not, I will. Mark David Chapman should be a national hero. Hell, maybe even a world hero. He did us all a favor by eradicating one more hippie who thought that merely by wishing the world were a place where "like, just sitting down and talking, man," would actually solve any problems, he could make it so. Seriously, listen to the lyrics to "Imagine." Lennon was a twit (and a hack lyricist to boot). Now listen to the lyrics to "The Ballad of the Green Berets" (SSG Barry Sadler, I believe). That's good American music!

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for diplomacy; negotiations that will stop armed conflict before it starts are a Good Thing. But sometimes you have to give war a chance (apologies to P.J. O'Rourke).

Here's to you, Mark David Chapman, for having the courage to do what so many others couldn't.

--
They that would sacrifice their .sig space for that cliched Franklin quote deserve neither.
Re:It was inevitable by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-27 05:47 · Score: 0

The fact is it was he who did it.. He should take responsability.
The first spam attempt was actually bounced.. It didn't work.. He could have said "wait somethings wrong.. Am I doing something wrong here?" He didn't..
When half of Usenet went off-line becouse of his spam he could have said "Oh.. I'm sorry" he didn't.
Up and forward he had many many chances to wake up and realise he screwed up. Instead he just rejected each point and proclamed anyone who objected to spam as standing in the way of progress.

Really he didn't "invent" spam.. Spam existed before it's commertal incarnation. Anybody remember moose poetry? The term itself comes from Mucks where somebody would flood.

It clearly violated existing rules of edquet. Ovcer-cross posting, off topic posting etc.

Had he stayed inside the guidelines he might have still invented spam but as a positive/valid advertising modle. Instead he created a brand new form of massive abuse for the sake of money.

E-mail spam existed before the greencard... salesmen reading usenet news looking for clients. Still happends today. But spam makes it hard for those hard working sales people to find clients.

Oh HE started it.... by secondsun · 2002-03-26 01:25 · Score: 5, Funny

Does anyone have his email address; I want to tell him about this new penis surgury...

--
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.

Re:Oh HE started it.... by dattaway · 2002-03-26 02:19 · Score: 2

The night he systematically destroyed usenet news, we noticed there was a fax number on that famous spam. Surprisingly, it wasn't busy so we did the responsible thing and loaded it up with black pages in hopes it would melt.

Unfortunately, he must have loved all that attention and convinced other budding marketers they could reap the rewards of spam too. Perhaps the usenet death penalty needed to be applied in a more stricter sense so people like him can't father children.
Re:Oh HE started it.... by marnanel · 2002-03-26 02:30 · Score: 2

A little Googling around suggests l-ware.com might be a place to start.

--
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Re:Oh HE started it.... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:32 · Score: 0

I'd rather just find him and break his nose. And then kick him until I hear his ribs pop.
Re:Oh HE started it.... by Mauro · 2002-03-26 02:51 · Score: 1

Here is a bit more info on the bum....
Registrant:
Laurence Canter
P.O. Box 552
Geyserville, California 95411
United States

Registrar: Go Daddy Software (http://registrar.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: L-WARE.COM
Created on: 08-Mar-01
Expires on: 08-Mar-03
Last Updated on: 22-Feb-02

Administrative Contact:
Canter, Laurence larry@thecanters.com
Laurence Canter
4035 Alexander Valley Lane
Healdsburg, CA 95448
United States
(707) 473-9490
Technical Contact:
Canter, Laurence lcanter@l-ware.com
Laurence Canter
4035 Alexander Valley Lane
Healdsburg, CA 95448
United States
(707) 473-9490

Domain servers in listed order:
NS2.INTERMEDIA.NET
NS3.INTERMEDIA.NET
Re:Oh HE started it.... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:54 · Score: 0

Usenet is being systematically destroyed by IP pirates and their binary attachments.

So stop with the bullshit claiming that this guy's action, years ago, killed Usenet.

We need to run all the cheeto-dicks and their porn off Usenet, not some spammer.
Re:Oh HE started it.... by dattaway · 2002-03-26 03:01 · Score: 2

News servers choose which groups they spool and often do not carry the bloated binary groups.

Alt.sex was not a binary newsgroup and was the most popular forum visited by estimates of 100,000 people a week back in 1994. Quite impressive. Now it gets that many spams a week.

His passion and promotion of spam did indeed destroy the most popular forums into a cesspool of unwanted and useless promotions. You may deny the damage, but it is there.
Re:Oh HE started it.... by dattaway · 2002-03-26 05:18 · Score: 2

You forgot to add html formatting for Mr. Canter's email address at home and at work.

Point and click on the convient links to communicate with Mr. Canter and how you feel about spam. But please make this personal, not the automated bombing he performed.
Re:Oh HE started it.... by 56ker · 2002-03-26 08:14 · Score: 1

I've never got any of this foreign spam - perhaps I'm just lucky or
/begin rant
NOT STUPID ENOUGH TO GIVE MY E-MAIL ADDRESS TO SPAMMERS IN THE FIRST PLACE
/end rant

--

Video Game cheats, hints a
Re:Oh HE started it.... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 08:22 · Score: 0

I've never "given" my email address to a spammer, but it is posted on my company's website (kind of important, y'know) as well as several domain name contacts. So when http bots and whois-reaping bots harvest names, mine gets on the list. And I get spam. It's unavoidable.

On that subject, heres another couple addresses for the spam bots:

topsitemarketing@supereva.it
webmaster@topsitem arketing.com
postmaster@topsitemarketing.com

fucking .it fucks...
Re:Oh HE started it.... by amuro98 · 2002-03-26 09:06 · Score: 1

Yeah and back then, there was *useful* information on that group.

But then the gates burst open, filling the whole hierarchy with porno ad spams.

And don't get me stared on the help-wanted groups...
Re:Oh HE started it.... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 15:38 · Score: 0

This article and resulting conversation (and the posting you replied to) primarily concerns Usenet spam, not e-mail spam resulting from sharing his or her e-mail address with spammers.

Spam by the_Bionic_lemming · 2002-03-26 01:27 · Score: 4, Funny

Well, I didn't know who started it, but now I know who to forward it all to.

--
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!

Quote from the interview by Ayon+Rantz · 2002-03-26 01:27 · Score: 2, Interesting

"I myself probably get 300 (spam e-mails) a day. I don't even attempt to read them. I just delete them all right away."

I guess there's justice in the world after all :)

--
Pokéthulhu
Gotta catch you all!

Spamming is a right by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:29 · Score: 0, Troll

Sending spam is right that we all have as users of open distributed systems.

If that right is revoked, what is next? Your freedom to browse whatever website you want?

People need to wake up or they will come for YOU next. At its core, this is a basic civil rights issue.

Re:Spamming is a right by V1m+Fuego · 2002-03-26 01:46 · Score: 1

Yeah, and freedom of speech allows me to send you commercial mail that you have to pay the postage for? I think not, thief.

Spamming is theft of facilities and is no more covered by freedom of speech than rioting is protected by freedom of association.
Re:Spamming is a right by Peyna · 2002-03-26 01:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

This is NOT a civil rights issue. Since you are causing financial harm to receivers of your message, you are not protected by the first amendment.

SPAM is comparable to if I had to pay the postage on all the junk mail I received from the post office, BEFORE I get to see who it's from, what it is, or even if it is junk mail. When you send SPAM you are infringing on my rights a lot more than I am infringing on yours by trying to stop you. By the way, the state of Indiana just passed an anti-telemarketer law not too long ago, and I don't see it being declared unconstitutional by anyone. Maybe that could be seen as some sort of precedence?

Go back to your bridge you silly troll.

--
What?
Re:Spamming is a right by KC7GR · 2002-03-26 02:00 · Score: 1

Your "right" to send spam ends where my private property (my servers and bandwidth) begins.

The same holds true for ALL those who own/operate Internet-connected hosts.

In other words, you can send anything you want. There is no law that forces anyone to listen, or even to receive your crap.

Get a life, spam-boy!

--
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,

Blue Feather Technologies
Re:Spamming is a right by why-is-it · 2002-03-26 02:35 · Score: 2

Sending spam is right that we all have as users of open distributed systems.

Nonsense! It is not a right to waste somebody else's bandwidth, disk space, and CPU cycles. At least with snail SPAM, the SPAMMER has to pay for the postage.

People need to wake up or they will come for YOU next. At its core, this is a basic civil rights issue.

Or not... Hyperbole does not a persuasive argument make.

How the fsck did this obvious troll get moderated up for being interesting?

--
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Re:Spamming is a right by delcielo · 2002-03-26 02:35 · Score: 2

I've tried; but I just can't remember which amendment it was that gave us a right to the internet.

Free speech is a right. There is no right to have your speech heard by everybody you think ought to hear it.

Sorry. It's just not the way it is.

--
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Re:Spamming is a right by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:00 · Score: 0

I just can't remember which amendment it was that gave us a right to the internet.

I prefer to turn that sentiment around a little.

What gives you the inherent right to an Internet minus spam?

If you choose to 'belong' to a loose consensus-based thing like the internet, with no accountability, where you can send anonymous mail, participate in anonymous forums, etc. you take it whole cloth or you go away.

The fact is, all the fury from you guys is because spammers take advantage of the voluntary anonymous nature of the 'net in a way that puts at risk your 'right' to your anonymnity.

End-to-end validation of email traffic sources, the end of anonymnity. The end of kinda-sorta 'Request For Comment' based 'rules'. It's all on it's way and it will all help solve this 'spam' problem. A hell of a lot more than some tards on a weblog ranting will.
Re:Spamming is a right by DavidTC · 2002-03-26 04:17 · Score: 1

What gives you the inherent right to an Internet minus spam?
Hey, idiot, read the AUP of your service sometime. Guess what...it's against the AUP to send spam. Wow.
The internet is a private network. The private companies making up the internet have said that they do not wish spam on it. What gives you the right to say otherwise?
Just like you can't rent a hotel room and keep livestock in it, you can't rent an internet conection and send spam over it. Their network, their rules.
Now, there are a few spam friendly ISPs, but, like the man says, we hope they like their intranet, because they sure aren't going to be allowed to connect to the rest of the internet's mail servers.

--
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Re:Spamming is a right by ewhac · 2002-03-26 07:55 · Score: 2

Feeding the Trolls is rarely a good idea, but I'd just like to offer for your consideration that the impact on Free Speech is the only issue involved. There are no other legitimate arguments that can be brought to bear in favor of spam.
Moreover, the people making these arguments (the spammers) care about the First Amendment precisely to the extent -- and no further -- that it allows them to clog the network with their unwated dross. If I were, in turn, to exercise my First Amendment rights and call a spammer a destructive, sociopathic, polluting rat-bastard, I'm sure I'd find myself on the receiving end of a libel/slander suit.
I find it useful to think of spam as a form of pollution; something that is destructive to the environment (Internet) and universally unwanted. You have the right to Free Speech; you do not have the right to pollute. If we can cast the debate in those terms, I think we'll find a solution more quickly.
Schwab

--
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Re:Spamming is a right by amuro98 · 2002-03-26 09:09 · Score: 1

That's why snail mail ads aren't spam.

Annoying, yes. Spam, no.

No if someone sent you advertising postage due, then I'd call it spam.

Invented? Pah! by Dynamoo · 2002-03-26 01:29 · Score: 2, Funny

Back in 1987 we mass-mailed everyone at the university I was studying at to offer them floppy disks for sale. We gathered the names from the mail system usage tables on our Multics system.

Needless to say we got dragged up before the head of school, and severely told off.. but in those days they didn't have any rules against spamming, so that was all they could do.

That was 15 years ago. I guess we weren't the first then either.

We never did sell any floppy disks though! :)

--
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com

Re:Invented? Pah! by gazbo · 2002-03-26 02:02 · Score: 2

So you mailed a small list of people to sell floppies, and got no sales. This guy sends out mail to every usenet group his script could find, successfully generating between $100,000 and $200,000 despite the fact that the cancelling of their account meant that they could not read tens of thousands more emails. He proved it was commercially viable, and thus spawned a myriad of copycats. Gee, I wonder why they wrote the article about him not you ;-)

/changes subject

Okay, so spamming is a royal pain in the arse. but some people are vilifying this man to a stupid extent, like the poster who said he was like Hitler (and I think he was being serious) Please try not to lose perspective of how relatively trivial this matter was. Yes, I said trivial and meant it; every day atrocities happen that are far worse than this - spam is annoying and very little more. Besides, it's evidently creating business for advertisers, and created an industry of providers, so it's not all bad...
Re:Invented? Pah! by Dynamoo · 2002-03-26 02:10 · Score: 1

Hmmm.. we did a couple of thousand addys, but we deliberately restricted the circulation so it DIDN'T get out onto Usenet and across different institutions.
I'm pretty certain I remember EMPs on Usenet before then.. but the point I wanted to make is it's no big deal.. it's an obvious use of the medium and frankly he's right when he says that someone else would have done it if he hadn't.
IMHO the really evil bastards are those who write email-addy-gathering spiders that scrape email addresses of web pages.. those things are the bane of my life I can tell you!

--
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Re:Invented? Pah! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:07 · Score: 0

If this guy had had the tool (Advanced Email Extractor) that Elcomsoft**, and 'freedom poster boy' Dmitry has developed and sells, he wouldn't have had to scratch around and only send spam to a small list of email addresses.

Yep. Mister Poster boy, the guy the EFF considers their big hero, works for a company that produces an email-harvesting utility for extracting addresses from Websites and other online content.

Just lovely. And yet we all LOVE the little dude and want to make sure he's okay. Send in money to support his fight to sell his products in America.

** They appear to be hiding the 'Mail Utilities' site under a one way link away from ElcomSoft's main page. These fuckers KNOW what they're doing and they know it's dirty.
Re:Invented? Pah! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:10 · Score: 0

the really evil bastards are those who write email-addy-gathering spiders

Bingo! That's Dmitry's bizness, at ElcomSoft.

Send in your dollars to the EFF, because they're defending his company's right to do business in the US.
Re:Invented? Pah! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 04:35 · Score: 0

Oh my god that is one evil company. The marketing hype sinks to a new low as they describe the "undetectable" technology used to bulk mailboxes through 33.6K modems. Interesting how they claim to have five stars for all their "Direct Remailing" spamming software.
Re:Invented? Pah! by amuro98 · 2002-03-26 09:13 · Score: 1

Not surprising...

While I doubt most universities have a "no spamming" policy, most of them DO have a "no using University property for personal economic gain" policy.

So, spamming everyone in your school using your school's computer would be a no-no.

At least you learned your lesson, unlike this jerk who *still* sees nothing wrong with spamming even after losing his law liscense.

live and learn by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:30 · Score: 0

Some time ago, I saw an article in slashdot of two spammers who had been found dead from their workplace.
They had been shot in the head - why I haven't seen this kind of news lately? It was a good start, why stop now?

Find them and destroy them by skroz · 2002-03-26 01:30 · Score: 3, Funny

Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"

Hopefully all of this will come with a white hot poker in his ass.

--
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.

Re:Find them and destroy them by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:49 · Score: 0

over 10,000 never had a bath and still HOT TO TROTT you men a?
Re:Find them and destroy them by ackthpt · 2002-03-26 01:51 · Score: 1

No doubt.
But I comfort myself with the thought of their perdition being an eternity of having to read all of it.
"Oh look, my first day here and I already have email!"
Free daily dirty pics
Got debt?
No pills diet plan, shed pounds
$*(#$^@!@)(&$%
Sex Zoo
Mortgage rates have never been lower!
Russian woman want to meet you
Viagara over the internet
*@!#)(#&^!~
Dirty teens getting nasty . . .
Is your green card about to expire?
375,122,934,350,124,228 messages in mailbox (Delete has permanently been disabled)

--

A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:Find them and destroy them by Bowfinger · 2002-03-26 01:58 · Score: 4, Funny

Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"
Wouldn't the ads be more like "FREE ice water!!!!!" and "Make your own air conditioner - absolutely legal", with maybe an occasional "Hidden heaven cam, hot teen angels! (34231)"?
Re:Find them and destroy them by eyeball · 2002-03-26 03:16 · Score: 1

"Hidden heaven cam, hot teen angels! (34231)"?

Nice touch :)

--

_______
2B1ASK1
Re:Find them and destroy them by DavidTC · 2002-03-26 04:24 · Score: 1
1 bounce, mailbox full.
- From vacationrequest@hell.org
  Vacation request approval, please choose one of the following weeks...
--
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Re:Find them and destroy them by biobogonics · 2002-03-26 08:44 · Score: 1

Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"

Suitable punishments:

1. Opening Satan's aspirin bottles.

2. Opening Satan's CDs.

3. Maintaining Satan's Windows 98 SE based network.

4. Watching an endlessly repeating loop of TV commercials for lawyers (Larry, Sam and Lee) interspersed with ads for Debt consolidators and Oxy Clean.

5. Sharing a dungeon with Al Gore.

Anyone know his email address? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:30 · Score: 0

I think it might be nice if everyone forwarded him a copy each piece of spam they receive today. Just as a thank you.

Re:Anyone know his email address? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:57 · Score: 0

Registrant:
Laurence Canter
P.O. Box 552
Geyserville, California 95411
United States

Registrar: Go Daddy Software (http://registrar.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: L-WARE.COM
Created on: 08-Mar-01
Expires on: 08-Mar-03
Last Updated on: 22-Feb-02

Administrative Contact:
Canter, Laurence larry@thecanters.com
Laurence Canter
4035 Alexander Valley Lane
Healdsburg, CA 95448
United States
(707) 473-9490
Technical Contact:
Canter, Laurence lcanter@l-ware.com
Laurence Canter
4035 Alexander Valley Lane
Healdsburg, CA 95448
United States
(707) 473-9490

fun with spam... by bje2 · 2002-03-26 01:32 · Score: 0, Redundant

have fun with spam, like this guy does....

--

"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson

Where their is a sucker... by CrazyDuke · 2002-03-26 01:32 · Score: 0, Redundant

...there is someone willing to suck it. However, I associate spam with the serious start of the current corporate trend to screw over and piss off its customers as a means of increasing profits. How appropriate its a lawyer, don't you think?

--
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.

Re:Where their is a sucker... by ackthpt · 2002-03-26 02:01 · Score: 1

Of course it's a lawyer, don't you know anything by now? ;-)
Yeah, I know, that's practically flamebait, but it so reminds me of Jon Lovitz portrayal of unethical lawyers. Yet, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel have made a Sisyphus of each and every one of us.

--

A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar

Spammer reminisces by grinwell · 2002-03-26 01:33 · Score: 1

Do you think spam plays a useful role in today's Internet?

To some extent, we probably welcome advertising. The problem with the incredible volume of unsolicited e-mail that we get today though is that, unlike junk mail that you receive in your snail mailbox, it's not immediately apparent that something is junk mail. With e-mail, you have to at least read the subject or who it's from to determine that it's junk and you don't want it. And the fact that it's so easy and, for practical purposes, costs nothing to send is resulting in considerably greater volume.
Is it useful? There have been times when I've gotten an unsolicited e-mail ad that was of interest to me.

Undoubtably he needs penile enlargement, burn DVDs, and to refinance his home mortgage with random internet companies.

Re:Spammer reminisces by Peyna · 2002-03-26 01:38 · Score: 2

I've had more devious snail mail than e-mail (like it comes in a security envelope labeled 'confidential' or 'time sensitive' or something like that.) Most SPAM is pretty obvious, since they always have those silly numbers at the end of the subject line, or other clues.
Also, how often do you get snail mail for pyramid schemes, porno, and other such rip offs? Most snail mail junk mail is from well known companies or local businesses. (Capitol One sends me a new credit card thing every week, grr). Anyway, I think I'm much more likely to find something of use in my snail mail box junk mail than in my e-mail. Afterall, you sometimes find a good deal/coupon among that mess. I don't know if I can say that for 99% of the spam I've received.

--
What?
Re:Spammer reminisces by B1 · 2002-03-26 01:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

To some extent, we probably welcome advertising. The problem with the incredible volume of unsolicited e-mail that we get today though is that, unlike junk mail that you receive in your snail mailbox, it's not immediately apparent that something is junk mail.

Ugh... this guy doesn't get it!

The REAL problem with unsolicited e-mail is that the cost of delivering it is ultimately borne by the carriers and the ultimate recipient, not the sender. The sender just has to pay $20 or so for a throwaway dialup account, and he can blast out thousands of emails before he gets shut down.

The recipient's ISP has to pay for extra storage capacity, bandwidth costs, and larger SMTP servers, so that his infrastructure doesn't collapse under the deluge of spam. The open relays between the spammer and ISP also incur significant bandwidth and processing costs, with no compensation.

At least with junk mail, the sender pays a bulk mailing rate and covers the costs of delivering it. He can send as much as he likes, but now there's an incentive to control his costs and make some attempt to target his mailings.

If there were a way of passing the true costs of spam back to the original sender, we would probably see a sharp reduction in volume.
Re:Spammer reminisces by sulli · 2002-03-26 03:43 · Score: 1

He clearly needs penile enlargement!

--

sulli
RTFJ.
Re:Spammer reminisces by tps12 · 2002-03-26 06:30 · Score: 1

The recipient's ISP has to pay for extra storage capacity, bandwidth costs, and larger SMTP servers, so that his infrastructure doesn't collapse under the deluge of spam. The open relays between the spammer and ISP also incur significant bandwidth and processing costs, with no compensation.
This cost is included in the cost of the account. That is, the cost to the ISP is borne by the recipient. As for the cost of bandwidth and temporary storage between sender and recipient, that is always paid for by the "next guy down." So the ISP is paying whomever they lease their bandwidth from, and the recipient pays them. Really, it only costs individuals with Internet accounts (other things being equal, evenly). The fortunate side effect is, the less spam there is, the less everyone pays for it, so when people protect their email addresses, everyone benefits.
At least with junk mail, the sender pays a bulk mailing rate and covers the costs of delivering it. He can send as much as he likes, but now there's an incentive to control his costs and make some attempt to target his mailings.
Are you complaining that there is no per-email fee? If this made economic sense, we would already be paying per item. Or you could set up a mail server that, when someone emails you, responds with a message asking for a micropayment. But I'm guessing that might make you a little unpopular.
If there were a way of passing the true costs of spam back to the original sender, we would probably see a sharp reduction in volume.
The true costs are minimal. I spend all of 15 seconds, if that, deleting spam a day. After using this address exclusively for 3.5 years, and posting freely to slashdot and Usenet, and with no filtering in place. That's less time than it takes me to sort out real snail mail from spam, and I don't need to carry it to the wastebasket.
As for hardware costs, more nonsense. The spam I get in a month is probably less than the size of a single Flash banner ad.

--

Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)

Maybe this is a dumb question... by neirboj · 2002-03-26 01:33 · Score: 1

but why is it that we despise spam so much more than other mass marketing techniques? It might be that there's simply more opportunity to rail against spammers. For some reason though, people who send UCEs are called devil-spawn whereas companies that engage in mass marketing via snail-mail (for example) are just a mild nuisance most of the time.

Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by mosch · 2002-03-26 01:36 · Score: 1

Get a connection where you pay for your bandwidth and you'll see. The recipient pays for spam. The sender pays for snailmail. Additionally snailmail tends to be reasonably well-targeted, due to the expense involved, whereas email spam just gets sent to fucking everybody. After all, your eight year old daughter might be really interested in naked co-ed sluts!
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by andrewscraig · 2002-03-26 01:42 · Score: 1

The main problem with Spam over other forms of mass marketing is that the person who receives it effectively has to pay for it. With say TV advertising, billboards or snail-mail, the marketer has to spend large €€€'s getting it to the end-user, whereas for the spammer they pay a little bit for a long long list of emails - or write their own crawler to do it for them - and then send all the mails over time.
Snail mail is generally better targeted as well - I don't care much about getting Green Cards for living in the US given that I live thousands of km's away from it, but the fact that Tescos has a special offer on donuts could be quite useful.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Indras · 2002-03-26 01:42 · Score: 3, Insightful

but why is it that we despise spam so much more than other mass marketing techniques?

No matter how full your snail-mail box is, it only takes a couple seconds to empty it and sort through it. You don't pay anything for that junk (except for maybe the garbage collection fee, but that's a flat rate no matter how full your dumpster out back is).

E-mail, on the other hand, is something people pay dearly for. If you're on a slower than broadband connection, like a modem or cell phone, you're usually paying by the minute, and with many spam messages reaching 50k or larger, it can take more than ten seconds each to download. How many here get more than twenty a day? That's over three minutes of your money going to waste. And no matter what connection speed you're on, it takes time to go through and delete them all (no more than sorting snail mail, I guess). And what about the people that get e-mail at their pagers? Many pay money per e-mail.

Spam isn't just evil, it's expensive!

--
The speed of time is one second per second.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:57 · Score: 0

I hate telemarketers more than spammers right now, but that's because I get more telemarketing calls than spam email lately.

(changing my email address and not giving it out really cuts down on that stuff)

The issue is time and expense. Taking a g**d**n telemarking call takes time out of my life. Listening to a computer recording on my answering machine to see if there are any messages AFTER takes time out of my life.

Telemarketers and spammers should be roasted live over hot coals with the spit rammed through their anus.

Don't tell me that everyone needs to earn a living, and telemarketers are just trying to get by. I would live on the street eating out of trash cans before I would telemarket to people.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by nochops · 2002-03-26 01:59 · Score: 1

I can't speak for anyone else, but i hate spam more than the other methods simply because of the "scumminess" of those doing the spamming.

With telemarketing, for instance, I get phone calls about donating money to my local police force, or perhaps buying a newspaper subscription.

My daily snail mail includes the run-of-the-mill credit card offers and carpet cleaning offers.

I have never received a phone call or snail mail concerning "hot young sluts" or anything like that.

--
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by KC7GR · 2002-03-26 02:06 · Score: 1

The only "dumb" question is the one you keep to yourself.

I think I can best respond by pointing you to a few of my favorite links. Between the lot of them, you should be able to get a very good idea of why spammers are truly nothing more than common thieves.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

http://imarketingsolutions.com/why_spam_is_bad.h tm

http://uk.spam.abuse.net/spam/spambad.html

http://www.twowriters.net/spam.htm

--
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,

Blue Feather Technologies
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by DrXym · 2002-03-26 03:07 · Score: 2

Why do you have to ask why people despise spam? Isn't it enough that we do? But if you want rational reasons, here are some of mine.

Spam transfers the cost of reading their shit onto the reader. You pay for the connection, for the hit in network performance on the internet (as it processes it all), on your time as you delete it and set up filters. At least with snail mail, they are paying and you can derive some small satisfaction when you toss it in the bin. There are also mature laws covering postal mail.

Snail mail also tends to be targetted, touting for legitimate business, whereas spam is almost entirely illegitmate being randomly targetted, offensive (adult sites), sleazy (penis enlargers, viagra, pheromones, fake subjects, js popups etc.), illegal (nigerian money scams, mlms, cable descramblers etc.) or purely incomprehensible (taiwanese). Worse yet, forged headers and open relays mean you have no idea where this crap came from. I get 30 or more pieces of crap like this a day and I deeply resent having to deal with it.

Note that I consider spam to be something I never asked for and something I have no way of opting out of. I do find value in mailing lists from reputable companies as long as I can unsubscribe to them.

Anyway, enough of the rationalising. I reckon we should implement sharia law for spammers and cut their hands off for theft of service.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:10 · Score: 0

but why is it that we despise spam so much more than other mass marketing techniques? It might be that there's simply more opportunity to rail against spammers. For some reason though, people who send UCEs are called devil-spawn whereas companies that engage in mass marketing via snail-mail (for example) are just a mild nuisance most of the time.

Maybe to you, but I regularly rip up snail-mail spam and send it back to other snail-mail spammers in their business reply envelopes. At least in the snail mail world I get the satisfaction of knowing they have to pay for their spam. I don't pay anything to receive postal mail.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:13 · Score: 0

Well, maybe the solution is that senders should pay for their bandwidth too.

Whoops. There goes anonymnity.

Oh well. The Internet was never meant to scale the way it's been forced to.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:17 · Score: 0

If you're on a slower than broadband connection, like a modem or cell phone, you're usually paying by the minute,

Nope. Nobody I know pays by the minute to receive email.

Perhaps you've got a fucked up deal going with your Telcom and/or ISP. Deal with it.

The myth of the 'high cost of spam' is a shit arguement.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by JasonAsbahr · 2002-03-26 03:36 · Score: 1

You'll hear a lot about the $$$ cost of spam, but the real cost is attention. Unlike "regular" junk mail, spam appears to us 24x7, throughout the day, while we are working or playing, and often is accompanied by some alert that we've received it (a sound or visual cue). It doesn't take many pointless interruptions of this nature before you start to get irritated, and it only takes a while (say, a few years??) of it before you get homicidal. :-)

Enough spam makes the channel useless. Too much noise, not enough signal. That's one reason why I don't have a land line anymore -- unsolicited sales calls make it useless to me. Now all my voice traffic is over a cell phone, and no one calls that unless I want to hear from them.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Steve+B · 2002-03-26 03:39 · Score: 2

Simple -- because spam forces its costs upon the recipient. If not firmly suppressed, it would quickly proliferate to the point of drowning out all useful communication.

--
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by J.+Random+Software · 2002-03-26 03:58 · Score: 1

Apparently you don't know anyone outside the United States. Nor anyone with a dedicated circuit who pays by the bit.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 04:19 · Score: 0

Snail mail is generally better targeted as well - I don't care much about getting Green Cards for living in the US given that I live thousands of km's away from it, but the fact that Tescos has a special offer on donuts could be quite useful.

Hell, YOU don't want to get them? Why would I, an American citizen, want to be spammed with green card info? I've never left the country in my lifetime except to go to Niagra Falls in Canada yet I get spam from China and Russia and all over the fucking world in script I can't even read. I get penis enlargement advertisements, porn spam, credit spam, loans, insurance, etc. I am spammed out of my fucking skull.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by shameless · 2002-03-26 05:26 · Score: 1

No matter how full your snail-mail box is, it only takes a couple seconds to empty it and sort through it.
Something else to consider is the following: In most countries, the postal system is a monopoly, and this monopoly has very clear rules for how mail should be labelled and paid for. As a result, the "sorting criteria" for snail mail can be made very straightforward.
To invoke a USAn example: when sorting my snail-mail box, anything bearing full first-class postage gets my immediate, undivided attention -- it is most likely a personal, one-to-one communication that is highly relevant and of interest to me (the electronic analogue would be work-related email from a colleague).
Next down the list would be matter bearing "presorted first-class" postage. It was likely sent out in a large batch but still not at "carpet-bombing" rates; it is likely to be of significant interest to a class of people that includes me. An electronic example of this would be a newsletter from a company that I regularly do business with.
On the bottom of the heap is mail bearing bulk-rate postage. This is the physical equivalent of spam, and I can almost certainly dispose of it unread without adverse consequences. If it's a slow mail day, I might give some of it a glance; otherwise, into the recycle bin it goes.
What's important here are two things: first, the postal monopoly imposes strict, standardized labeling requirements on the mail to indicate how it was paid for. Second, the rates themselves are set so that there is a strong economic incentive to use bulk-rate mail despite the fact that it basically has to bear a great big "SPAM" label.
By contrast, the nature of email is such that there is no economic incentive to label a mass-market spam as such. Thus, it costs about the same to send a personal email to one's best friend as it does to send a piece of spam. Worse, the nature of "labeling" email allows for deceptive labeling that cannot be filtered. A few years back, it was all the rage among junk snail-mailers to send their pitches in envelopes that were made to look as much as possible like the envelopes that government checks were mailed in. Fortunately for the public, the tell-tale bulk-rate indicia still had to be there.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by tps12 · 2002-03-26 06:39 · Score: 1

Spam transfers the cost of reading their shit onto the reader. You pay for the connection, for the hit in network performance on the internet (as it processes it all), on your time as you delete it and set up filters. At least with snail mail, they are paying and you can derive some small satisfaction when you toss it in the bin. There are also mature laws covering postal mail.
1. This is the same for any advertising method. 2. Whether or not you derive satisfaction from doing *anything* is really your own business and not anyone's fault but your own (I realize that was tongue in cheek, but still). 3. Postal mail is (everywhere? At least in the US) a government-created/-maintained monopoly, and if all email went through one body you can bet there would be some nice features as well, but at what cost?
Snail mail also tends to be targetted, touting for legitimate business, whereas spam is almost entirely illegitmate being randomly targetted, offensive (adult sites), sleazy (penis enlargers, viagra, pheromones, fake subjects, js popups etc.), illegal (nigerian money scams, mlms, cable descramblers etc.) or purely incomprehensible (taiwanese). Worse yet, forged headers and open relays mean you have no idea where this crap came from. I get 30 or more pieces of crap like this a day and I deeply resent having to deal with it.
Your taste, comprehension, and resentment are, again, all your own business. You have made a convincing argument that you don't like spam, but how does any of this make it wrong?

--

Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by hagardtroll · 2002-03-26 07:07 · Score: 1

Note that I consider spam to be something I never asked for and something I have no way of opting out of. I do find value in mailing lists from reputable companies as long as I can unsubscribe to them.

You have to be careful about legit opt-ins as well. I signed up to be on a mailing list for people who share my surname, to get info on family histories, etc. A legit mail list?

Well, I was immediately placed on the rootsweb commercial email list as well as ancestry.com. I was NOT given an option of opting out of those additional lists. Every time I get a mailing from ancestry.com I visit their web site and go throught the procedures to remove myself from that list. I also removed myself from the surname mailing list.

Months later, I am STILL getting email from ancestry.com and rootsweb! I have followed their procedures for opting out, but they don't seem to work!

STAY AWAY FROM ANCESTRY.COM!
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Anadandy · 2002-03-26 07:15 · Score: 1

Your taste, comprehension, and resentment are, again, all your own business. You have made a convincing argument that you don't like spam, but how does any of this make it wrong?

It goes beyond a question of personal taste. Spammers are indescriminantly sending out pornographic material without any care as to the recipient - including minors. How fast do you think someone would get hauled in if they handed out flyers touting "Hot Teen Action" complete with full color beaver shots at a grade school?
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by DrXym · 2002-03-26 08:48 · Score: 2

Your taste, comprehension, and resentment are, again, all your own business. You have made a convincing argument that you don't like spam, but how does any of this make it wrong?

Wrong is a line in a sand, drawn from our own judgement and standards for acceptable human behaviour. Someone who forces me (yes forces me) to receive and deal with stuff I do not and would never ask to see is wrong by my standards. It's akin to nuisance phone calls, or someone who follows you around and won't leave you alone

If I opt-in to junk mail then it's a different matter as long as I can opt-out again. As I said I have no sympathy for these bastards. Their behaviour is criminal and a nuisance.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 13:58 · Score: 0

because a mass snailmailing doesn't slow down the post office, it doesn't fill up my harddrive space that should be reserved for pr0n, mp3s, and dvd burns, and files filled with your credit card numbers, ok there jerky? oh and if you're wondering "What credit cards? i don't have any credit cards?!?" you'll understand in about a month or so Muhahahaha
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 14:08 · Score: 0

"Nope. Nobody I know pays by the minute to receive email."

That is because you're a stupid American who thinks the entire world has 1.5Mbps cable like you and your obese American friends.

The rest of the world is still paying per byte, and spam costs a fucking fortune.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by tps12 · 2002-03-28 07:29 · Score: 1

Someone who forces me (yes forces me) to receive and deal with stuff I do not and would never ask to see is wrong by my standards. It's akin to nuisance phone calls, or someone who follows you around and won't leave you alone
This is not really true to the definition of "force," since no one forces you to check your email, read your email, have an email account, etc. Likewise, no one forces you to have a telephone or answer the telephone. And no one forces you to go into public areas where someone could follow you around and bother you.
The only entity that can really force you to do anything is the government. If it were made a crime to not read every email addressed to you, then I would completely agree with you. But in that case, the villain would be the one forcing you to read email.
Apologies for the libertarian rhetoric, but I see making obnoxious behavior a crime as somewhat of a slippery slope.

--

Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... by tps12 · 2002-03-28 07:38 · Score: 1

How fast do you think someone would get hauled in if they handed out flyers touting "Hot Teen Action" complete with full color beaver shots at a grade school?
In public schools (where attendance is required, and the whole thing publicly funded and state controlled), hauling in anyone is a violation of free speech. In private schools, the owners can freely determine who is allowed to do what.
In real life, obviously it doesn't work this way, but that has more to do with a) Puritanism (those guys again!) and b) widespread (and very reasonable) confusion as to the role public schools are to play. One of my favorite examples of this (in the U.S.) is that, while the Supreme Court has ruled (correctly) that "students' rights don't stop at the school room door," it is somehow okay to install metal detectors at that same school room door, thus denying students their 2nd Amendment rights. This gets so confusing: can students be forced to implicate themselves if testifying in school? Can students be placed twice in jeopardy for the same crime...in school? If jailed in school, does a student have a right to representation or a speedy trial?

--

Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)

What really makes me angry... by AltGrendel · 2002-03-26 01:34 · Score: 2

...is his smug attitude about the whole thing.

--
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination

- Douglas Adams

Re:What really makes me angry... by ackthpt · 2002-03-26 01:40 · Score: 1

...is his smug attitude about the whole thing.
Exactly. No remorse for starting this plague, for starting the whole mess in USENET, relentlessly pursuing spamming readers, effectively funding advancement in spamming. It's the plague we'll have for the rest of our lives, will cost businesses billions, clogs up my email so bad when I'm on vacation that I miss important mail, and he's just fine with that. Truly all of hell can only look on this individual with admiration.

--

A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:What really makes me angry... by Zeinfeld · 2002-03-26 04:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

...is his smug attitude about the whole thing.
Which is wierd because most people who realised back in 1994 that the Internet would be huge commercially and acted on it are millionaires today. Canter could have been Amazon, or at the very least CEO of a startup that went under but only after making the founders ten million or so in the IPO.
Instead Canter was disbarred from practising law in the whole US as a direct result of the SPAM incident. He dosen't mention that of course. Most lawyers would think $200,000 to be a pretty poor return for something that causes you to loose your license to practise law. Admittedly Canter's case was overdetermined, he had been previously disbarred in another state. However the Arizona bar chose to bar him for the SPAM and bringing the profession into disrepute rather than failing to inform them of disciplinary proceedings in another state.
The fact is that on the Internet you don't do so well by using sharp practices. The guy who wrote the Perl script for Canter disputes the claim that they made any money. The ratio of genuine to false responses was way to high for it to be economic. However Canter and Siegel thought that they could make a fortune by conning others into spamming.
Canter and Siegel managed to wreck Usenet, but it probably would have gone down anyway. I had a look at soc.culture.british last night, not a single substantive post. Almost everything there was political spam from various varieties of fascist in support (or opposition to) some war criminal or other.
Fixing USEnet is one of those things that lots of people keep trying to get arround to. It is pretty clear that there is a need to have some form of authentication on the posts and that some form of moderation is necessary. I originally became interested in Slashdot after Jammie told me about the moderation scheme. Thing is that Slashdot is a very narrow resource compared to UseNet.
Oh and I do mean fixing USEnet, not just NNTP, although NNTP's flood fill routing is broken too.

--
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/

He's not just a bad guy by jukal · 2002-03-26 01:35 · Score: 0

like: "As a matter of fact, we made a proposal in 1994 with Usenet to (filter spam) by simply starting it with the word 'ad.' Because almost any program can filter things out. So if you don't want it, you can get rid of it. That would be one simple solution. I'm always very hesitant to suggest that we should have any kind of censorship."

Based on this interview it seems that his idea is that spam is bad only when it gets to mailbox of those people who did not want it.

"I think there should be some mechanism in place to make it easy to not receive it or to filter it out before it ever arrives at your computer. "
"There should be some kind of regulation. I'm not sure that the regulation of e-mail should be, or needs to be, different than the regulation of any other form of communication. "

The biggest culprits are those that can make regulations on these matters, and did not do that in time. If it was done in 1994, the spamming culture might be totally different. Have we learnt the lesson yet? :)

Playing fast and loose with history ... by jc42 · 2002-03-26 01:35 · Score: 5, Interesting

This guy definitely has a slender hold on reality. He describes 1994 as a time when the "Internet was new", and talk about using Compuserve, which was a "precursor to the Internet".

If this is what passes for factual history in his world, there's no apparent reason that we should listen to anything else he has to say.

What's disappointing is that the reporter apparently saw no need to comment on the accuracy of such "facts".

--
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.

Re:Playing fast and loose with history ... by md_doc · 2002-03-26 01:45 · Score: 0, Offtopic

The reporter was just trying to get people to visit the CNET.com site which they seem to have done by getting this article posted on /. Personally I think no one should go visit or even read the thing and e-mail CENT.com and tell them they are idiots for even talking to the guy.

--
--MD--
Re:Playing fast and loose with history ... by khendron · 2002-03-26 01:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'd actually have to let that one slide.

Back in 1994 the Internet *was* new, from the general public perspective. Sure, it had been around for years, but but wasn't in the news that much. A better way of phrasing it would be to state that something new was happening *to* the Internet: the average person was climbing on board. For the first time in history a large number of average citizens were accessible via electronic means.

To most people, Compuserve *did* come before the Internet. Back in 1984 I paid a reasonable monthly charge to access Compuserve. I couldn't do the same with the Internet until 1993.

That said, I still find his smug "if we didn't do it somebody else would have" attitude annoying.

--
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Re:Playing fast and loose with history ... by nomadic · 2002-03-26 03:55 · Score: 2

Back in 1984 I paid a reasonable monthly charge to access Compuserve. I couldn't do the same with the Internet until 1993.

Reasonable? I remember at looking at the compuserv price lists and being astounded at the cost. Of course I was just a kid back then, but it was still pretty pricey.
Re:Playing fast and loose with history ... by khendron · 2002-03-26 06:48 · Score: 2

OK, I should be more specific. Back in 1984, my Dad paid a reasonable monthly charge so I could access Compuserve. I didn't pay a cent, therefore it was reasonable :-)

--
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.

Spam by any other name... by thenextpresident · 2002-03-26 01:37 · Score: 1, Insightful

The problem is most poeople who complain about smap in fact Opt-in to this spam when the sign up for wonderful free services like Yahoo mail and the what not. And then fail to remove themselves of the mailing list properly. Granted, there are a lot of spammers out there stealing emails, but at the same time, your average OE/IE using user doesn't take the time to read the Agreement that says "We are going to sell your info, oh yeah!". So when they get the spam, too bad for them. Yeah, it sucks, but is it really spam?

Of course, this was talking more about those spammers stealing emails however they could get it. I just notice that the average person who gets "SPAM" doesn't have a clue that yes, there are companies who actually "spam" legally. If you signup, and don't read the agreement, you get what you asked for, literally. =)

--
Jason Lotito

Re:Spam by any other name... by hcdejong · 2002-03-26 02:16 · Score: 1

The problem is most poeople who complain about smap in fact Opt-in to this spam when the sign up for wonderful free services like Yahoo mail and the what not.
I doubt that. Services like Yahoo will use your mail address themselves (by default), but I haven't seen many that will actually sell you address on.
Most of the spam I receive is because I used to post to Usenet groups with my real e-mail address. I suspect my address made it from there into one or more of those "80 million mail addresses for $10" scams. And why spend serious money buying addresses from Yahoo if you can have them at $0,000000125 a pop from J. Random Asshole?
Re:Spam by any other name... by J.+Random+Software · 2002-03-26 04:07 · Score: 1

Spammers' proffered "remove" mechanisms are mostly used only to confirm that an address is in use and send it more spam--complaints to the upstream ISP are far more likely to stop spam. Besides, there is no "proper" way to require me to remove my address from a list I never consented to add it to.
Re:Spam by any other name... by thenextpresident · 2002-03-28 06:30 · Score: 1

"Besides, there is no "proper" way to require me to remove my address from a list I never consented to add it to."

Agreed, and yes, you are right. I was refering to the "spam" people get that isn't really spam, but they call it that because the don't know better. Frankly, Email campaigns do work when they are sent appropriatly and to people that did in fact as for it. Its very effective in fact. Real Spam of course is bad, and I condone it in no way.

--
Jason Lotito

They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by andyr · 2002-03-26 01:37 · Score: 1, Informative

In case people don't read the article :-) remember they spammed Usenet. Usenet occupied a much more central role in geek life back then, but Usenet is definitely an Opt-in environment - you expect to find kooks on Usenet.

I think they even crossposted - meaning that a good newsreader would mark the message as already read in cross-posted groups.

But you could not crosspost to all groups - so one did read the same message too many times - hence all the vitriol .. They were the folks people loved to hate ..

Cheers, Andy!

--
Andy Rabagliati

Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by andrewscraig · 2002-03-26 01:45 · Score: 1

He didn't crosspost, he used a perl script to hit each group one at a time - there would be no link between each message other than the name woudl be the same I doubt any newsreader would detect that it was the same message (as the ID would be different).
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by blancolioni · 2002-03-26 01:48 · Score: 4, Informative

I think they even crossposted - meaning that a good newsreader would mark the message as already read in cross-posted groups.

No, they didn't crosspost, they sent one individual message to each newsgroup. This is what annoyed people.

It was a weird day. Each newsgroup I went to (and I was a student, so I read a lot of them) had this message. I'd never seen anything like it before, and I certainly didn't pick it as the thin end of the wedge.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:00 · Score: 2, Informative

Actually, they didn't crosspost-- they individually posted to every single group.

Before the full-scale war started, people tried to explain to them why 1) spamming was bad, and 2) why spamming in this fashion was _really_ bad. C&S never seemed to understand that real bandwidth (= money) was being wasted.

Not only did C&S not relent, they mocked the Usenet users in the press and published a book on how to reproduce their efforts. They started a company (Cybersell) and used aliases to post ads for others.

When they started spamming, C&S included their physical address, phone, and fax numbers. Once the ground war started, they quickly learned better. It was discovered that S had been disbarred in Florida, IIRC, but could still practice in Arizona. Other publicly available information about C&S was collected and disseminated.

Sure, somebody else would have done it, but until C&S, nobody had on the same scale.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by nochops · 2002-03-26 02:06 · Score: 1

Someone please mod the parent up please.

There's way too many comments about spam referring to email spam, which this guy did *not* do.

If you're going to hate him, fine. Just know why you hate him, and make sure that you know what you're talking about. Remember, he didn't spam anyone's mailbox.

--
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by JabberWokky · 2002-03-26 02:11 · Score: 5, Interesting

It was a weird day. Each newsgroup I went to (and I was a student, so I read a lot of them) had this message. I'd never seen anything like it before, and I certainly didn't pick it as the thin end of the wedge.
Nobody really knew - usenet was small enough that people knew a good chunk of the personalities across the entire list of groups. I'm still pissed I never bought a Segar Ardic (sp?) t-shirt. At least I have Fidonet, kibo and Nets on the Net tshirts.
Also, *nobody* had any filters set up to kill crossposts - crossposts were still useful. People were complaining about Delphi users being stupid and ignorant of netiquette (and netiquette was the rule, not the exception). Lots of tradition was lost as the delphoids, then Compuserve, then AOL, and finally Prodigy users came to usenet, each stupider and a larger mass of ignorance than the preveious group.
It was a different era after about 1991. Remember, this was before the web existed, and the internet was much more agressively peer to peer - ISPs tossed you a leased line, not a dialup. You could watch raw, uncompressed streaming video from MIT at Duke simply because there was nobody else using the bandwidth. No DoS attacks, no skriptkiddies, l337speak was still B1FF, and the trolls only hit appropriate threads, and were graduate students or professors tossing in as many inside references and jokes as possible.
It really was a different time - open to abuse simply because there had never really been any, and, like a society with no thieves doesn't make locks, the internet didn't really grow to handle abuse.
Lest you think it was too nice, there was no google or gnutella - Archie was nice, but there wasn't *that* much out there. No CNN, no BBC, no Slashdot, no instant messaging (of course, now there's no finger or write).
In such a different day, this really was a novel, new thing. Nobody except a few farseeing people thought it was anything but a single incident, not to be repeated. I certainly didn't - of course, I thought Mosaic was "neat, but much less useful than gopher". :)
--
Evan

--
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by jamie · 2002-03-26 02:26 · Score: 1

"I'm still pissed I never bought a Segar Ardic (sp?) t-shirt"

I still have my Serdar Argic T-shirt, the howling in the wires world tour. I've worn it maybe once, it's always seemed in bad taste.
For those who don't remember, Serdar Argic was a half-human, half-bot who crossposted to almost every Usenet group for months (over a year?) about his pet cause. That cause was whitewashing the Turkish genocide of the Armenians back during the First World War. In fact he claimed the Armenians committed all the crimes, against the Turks. And he had the facts to prove it! Bizarre.
Since he grepped the whole newsfeed and quasi-auto-replied to any post mentioning "Turkey," he became very popular around Thanksgiving...
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by dattaway · 2002-03-26 02:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

Damnit Jim, unenet news was my mailbox! Nothing like reading the morning news sipping a hot magical drink to start the day. It was a two way form of news. Quite wonderful.

The phrase "opt-in" as you suggested is not at all an accurate description. The automated carpet bombing spammers completely destroyed the most popular groups on usenet. Gone are many of the playgrounds where people could freely talk to others in the world. News spools were flooded at the expense of those people who wanted to provide this free exchange of information. The spammer paid almost nothing to start the flood distribution. We paid the price for their abuse.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by frankie · 2002-03-26 03:10 · Score: 2
I'd never seen anything like it before, and I certainly didn't pick it as the thin end of the wedge.
There are 3 internet-related moments I will always remember:
1. 1988: my first LAN download (10Mbps ether) instead of a 2400 modem.
2. 1994: Green Card Lottery
3. 1995: I typed in Yahoo's URL but it 301'ed to a new address.
I remember the feeling of epiphany each time -- "this is what the future will look like". The first one I was thrilled. The second one I was enraged. The third one I was mournful.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by frankie · 2002-03-26 03:21 · Score: 3, Interesting

Usenet is definitely an Opt-in environment

One other thing you missed -- not only did Green Card Lottery post to every group available on their server, they also forged approval headers for moderated groups. The first place I saw their spam was in news.announce.important, since like any good netizen I placed it at the start of my .newsrc

Back in the days of netiquette, this was something you simply DID NOT DO (except for the occasional AFJ).
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:25 · Score: 0

What pisses me off more are the binary newsgroups. They suck up humongous amounts of space, and have encouraged News Server admins to set the spools short, so the real information groups that some of us enjoy expire earlier too.

Shit, I know people who use binary attachment utilities like PluckIt and NewsBin, who have never ever once read the text body of a single article on Usenet.

Ban binary attachments from Usenet. It's really only a slightly different form of damage than spam.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:38 · Score: 0

Set up a news server sometime. The sample configuration files let you set the retention time or size of the binary groups as you see fit. Or deny them completely.

Most severs simply refuse binaries anyways.

Regardless, there are perfectly legitimate binary newsgroups that do bring a community together.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by J.+Random+Software · 2002-03-26 04:16 · Score: 1

People who have discussions on Usenet are such a small minority of any ISP's users that most ISPs wouldn't bother maintaining newsfeeds at all if not for demand for pr0n and w4r3z. Think of it like the junk mail subsidy for US first class mail, and an alarming comment on society.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by DavidTC · 2002-03-26 04:34 · Score: 1

Just because you happen to know stupid Usenet administrators doesn't mean binary newsgroups are bad.
Any sane administrator sets different expiration times for binary and text groups. And, of course, plenty of places don't even carry them.
Perhaps you should point out to your server admin that one day of binary groups equals two weeks of text groups, and instead of having everything at a week expire, he should have binary at six days and text at three weeks?

--
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 05:31 · Score: 0

I remember in the mid '80s being booted off of BBSs at 1:55PM so Fidonet BBSs all over the country could call each other and synch their message boards. I also remember pyramid schemes, mortgage offers, and all other sorts of get-rich-quick schemes. This guy definitely didn't invent spam, much less posting ads to a newsgroup/bbs.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by Caradoc · 2002-03-26 08:30 · Score: 1

In their later iterations, they *did* cross-post. They specifically cross-posted to regional newsgroups from global newsgroups, so that their messages would get propagated to other servers and also pollute the regional newsgroups.

I was a user on Internet Direct at the time. It was the deciding factor in moving off of their server, as most of the internet blackholed them for some time after that...

--
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by Cederic · 2002-03-26 21:47 · Score: 1

talk (ntalk, ytalk) was every bit as good as Instant Messaging for most uses.

Combined with Finger to know when people were around (or, better yet, log onto a mud) and no problem..

Or use IRC, which is a group IM.

Of course, MUDs are still around, and remain the best form of internet communication (cos you can do things, as well as say things)

btw, to stay on topic : I believe Canter and Siegel were evil. I loved the internet before they joined it. They single-handedly started the slippery slope of commercialisation that has seriously damaged usenet and made email address age fast.

~Cederic
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox by JabberWokky · 2002-03-27 04:21 · Score: 2

I used ytalk, myself, but used social MUDs to conference. IRC was pretty newfangled in my circles - it had been around for a few years, but I didn't know many people who used it. MUDs were much more suitable for group discussions, and had all the extras like bulletin boards, limited time notices, etc. When C&S happened, I was on A5 (After5) MUD, mostly.
They single-handedly started the slippery slope of commercialisation that has seriously damaged usenet and made email address age fast.
I agree. If not them, it might have been someone else, but it was them, and they should be properly villified. It's like the difference between seeing men and women as equals versus seeing men as superior - it's a cultural thing, and you have to be raised in a different society to understand it. The internet didn't have ads *anywhere* at one point, and it was considered okay to mention your own company, as it was *you* saying it, not your company advertising. It's a fine line only to those who were never there. So much was just understood. That's what makes up a culture I suppose. And now it's gone. Ah, well.
--
Evan

--
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien

Yeah, it is dumb. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:39 · Score: 0

People who send snail-mail marketing paid for the
stamp and the printing. They've borne the majority
of the cost of the advertising.

With e-mail spam - we and the networks the spammer
exploits bear those costs.

That said, snail-mail junk also sucks, but it does
not exploit the same kind of economics spam does.

T.

I wonder if he gets angry by qurob · 2002-03-26 01:40 · Score: 2, Funny

When he comes to work at 8:00 am and has 30 pieces of spam in his mailbox....

Is it any suprise that he has no regrets? by NoMoreNicksLeft · 2002-03-26 01:42 · Score: 2

After all, he is a lawyer so scummy, that other lawyers disbarred him.

Re:Is it any suprise that he has no regrets? by ImaLamer · 2002-03-26 11:35 · Score: 2

lol... look at your sig [spamming?]

And also try to get it to resolve.

--
Get your Unix fortune now!
Re:Is it any suprise that he has no regrets? by NoMoreNicksLeft · 2002-03-26 12:41 · Score: 2

Hardly spamming, I would think. AT&T's cable modem service sucks in too many big ways. Waiting for DSL and it's static IP. BTW, without running your own bind, the tld will never resolve.

Well, at least ONE of them is dead... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:42 · Score: 0

Sickening to see this jerk still getting publicity.

Lucky he "survived"... by CaptainAlbert · 2002-03-26 01:43 · Score: 1

> ...interview with the surviving lawyer who
> spammed Usenet with multiple "Green Card
> Lottery" posts in '94."

...makes me wonder what happened to all the other lawyers who spammed Usenet in '94? Were they thrown in a tar-pit or something?

I think this submission scores "Flamebait" from the outset. No rational discussion to be had here. Move along, please. :)

--
These sigs are more interesting tha

Re:Lucky he "survived"... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 04:40 · Score: 0

Read the article. There were two lawyers in the partnership behind the original Usenet spam: Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel (who happened to be husband and wife).

UUCP + dialup = usenet spam pain by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:43 · Score: 0

So when you're downloading 30% spam using uucp, and you're paying through the nose for that service (it is of course, 1994), YOU'RE PAYING FOR JUNK MAIL.
You can't see it's junk mail until you read it, and you can't read it until you download it, and thus, pay for it. This is why all these people need to be set on fucking fire.

This just in!!! by nochops · 2002-03-26 01:44 · Score: 5, Insightful

We have determined the caveman who is responsible for the first murder of another human being on planet Earth. Feel free to blame him for all subsequent murders.

Gimme a break. This guy is *NOT* responsible for all of the spam the we deal with today. A society made up of a bunch of money-hungry-but-too-lazy-to-get-off-their-asses-a nd-earn-some-money assholes is responsible for this.

If this guy is responsible for the spam plague, then why do we bother complaining to spammers / ISPs / web-hosts about our spam...Why not just send all of our complaints to this guy, since he's responsible, right?

--
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum

Re:This just in!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:53 · Score: 0

I think we can blame the first "first post"er for all the fp trolls we've got around today, though =]
Re:This just in!!! by GigsVT · 2002-03-26 02:02 · Score: 1

What you say is correct, someone else would have done it if he had not.

That doesn't change the fact that the guy is still a sleezy spammer that is just "waiting for the right chance" to spam again.

So, you're not sending unsolicited e-mail anymore?
I haven't been, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't at some time.

Do you think spam plays a useful role in today's Internet?
To some extent, we probably welcome advertising.

What a fucking dick.

--
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Re:This just in!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:02 · Score: 0

Gimme a break. This guy is *NOT* responsible for all of the spam the we deal with today. A society made up of a bunch of money-hungry-but-too-lazy-to-get-off-their-asses-a nd-earn-some-money assholes is responsible for this.

Er, actually, he wrote a book telling other people how to do what he did. He PROMOTED spam.
Re:This just in!!! by nochops · 2002-03-26 02:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

Funny isn't it...how you quote what you want, but fail to notice:

As a matter of fact, we made a proposal in 1994 with Usenet to (filter spam) by simply starting it with the word 'ad.' Because almost any program can filter things out. So if you don't want it, you can get rid of it. That would be one simple solution.

There should be some kind of regulation. I'm not sure that the regulation of e-mail should be, or needs to be, different than the regulation of any other form of communication.

--
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Re:This just in!!! by dattaway · 2002-03-26 02:31 · Score: 3

Well, this guy committed quite an act against a great form of communication that had been around for some time.

Imagine a serial killer talking with great passion about the acts he committed and the reaction sure to follow. Now imagine since he is the first serial killer, we must let him go since there surely must be more to follow. Might as well throw punishment away too.

No need for a deterrent here. Let's make a whole industry to thrive off the evils we allowed to enter our world. After all the anti-virus and spam software industry helps our economy and increases our standard of living. NOT!
Re:This just in!!! by nochops · 2002-03-26 02:57 · Score: 1

I never said that he's not responsible for what he did. Although it's not as bas a some people are making out (he spammed Usenet, not email), he is most certainly responsible for his Usenet postings.

My point is that the original Slashdot post leads people to believe that this guy's Usenet spam is responsible for the spam in 20 different languages that we get today, and that's just not true.

It's just another case of Slashdot's "editors" sensationalizing a headline that they know is sure to get lots of exposure (privacy, spam, OSS, etc.) here.

--
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Re:This just in!!! by Erasmus+Darwin · 2002-03-26 03:50 · Score: 5, Informative

"Gimme a break. This guy is *NOT* responsible for all of the spam the we deal with today."
In addition to the infamous greencard spam, he later coauthored the book "How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway" which encouraged others to do what he did (and rationalized such actions as being acceptable). So while he may not be exclusively responsible, he carries significantly more culpability than you're giving him credit for.
Re:This just in!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 04:13 · Score: 0

Back when there were just several people posting, it was kind of a cool joke... Now it can be pretty damn funny or pretty unsettling, depending on which way the caffeine molecules are spinning in the cup of coffee.
Re:This just in!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 04:23 · Score: 0

>If this guy is responsible for the spam plague, then >why do we bother complaining to spammers / ISPs / >web-hosts about our spam...Why not just send all of >our complaints to this guy, since he's responsible, >right?

I intend to, now that he has surfaced his fat, ugly face again. Procmail filter + his email addy = spam boomarang :-D

M.
Re:This just in!!! by 0x20 · 2002-03-26 09:56 · Score: 1

Bad analogy for many reasons.

Murder: high effort, high risk, low benefit.
Spamming: low effort, low risk, high benefit (or so people appear to think).

A person in his right mind wouldn't imitate a murder, no matter how many he'd seen committed. But I'm sure quite a few people folowed this guy's example, and had imitators follow them, and so on. This guy is at the root of a lot of spam weeds.

And it is a common concept in law that people can be held responsible if their behavior influences others to do illegal things.

Not to mention the fact that the first caveman murderer was still a jerk, even if nobody saw him do it. (or her.)

I have nothing against lawyers in general, but a spammer laywer? That I can hate.
Re:This just in!!! by geekoid · 2002-03-26 10:33 · Score: 2

but does that mean the first caveman that killed another shouldn't not be held accountable for his action?

--
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re:This just in!!! by GigsVT · 2002-03-27 01:52 · Score: 1

There should be some kind of regulation. I'm not sure that the regulation of e-mail should be, or needs to be, different than the regulation of any other form of communication.

This is a pro-spam argument.

--
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Re:This just in!!! by rark · 2002-04-02 08:21 · Score: 2

"A society made up of a bunch of money-hungry-but-too-lazy-to-get-off-their-asses-a nd-earn-some-money assholes is responsible for this"

Consider your first statement, and the fact that the vast majority people for any reasonable definition of society you could be using here (unless you are postulating that spammers come from their own society) not only have never spammed but also earn their own livings. Then you may see why I found this post so damn funny.
Re:This just in!!! by nochops · 2002-04-02 11:22 · Score: 1

Yes, I was referring to the spammer's subculture, if there is such a thing. I guess I should have worded it differently.

--
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum

User: "John Peterson" Passwd: "f5rin;" by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:44 · Score: 0

User: "John Peterson" Passwd: "f5rin;"

should charge one cent per email by peter303 · 2002-03-26 01:46 · Score: 2

Either ISPs or a government tax should charge one cent per email. The average user who probably sends less than a dollar's worth per day would hardly notice the charge. The spammer would be paralyzed.

Re:should charge one cent per email by dattaway · 2002-03-26 02:45 · Score: 2

Yes, and governments across the world should charge for the air we breathe. After all, if we don't pay our taxes, there would be no air on the planet. The average person only uses a dollar's worth of air anyway, so few people would notice the charge.
Re:should charge one cent per email by Carmody · 2002-03-26 03:29 · Score: 3, Insightful

Either ISPs or a government tax should charge one cent per email. The average user who probably sends less than a dollar's worth per day would hardly notice the charge. The spammer would be paralyzed.

I really hate it when people propose things without thinking them through.

Okay, lets say they did. What would be involved? We would have to create a structure, both technological (finding a way to bill you your pennies) and sociological (finding a way to get people to tolerate their government charging them for sending email)

Let's say you get your wish. There are certainly people working on both fronts right now to grant it. Now what? "Only a penny" right? But then, in the name of national security, we are going to have to raise it to a nickle. You aren't on the terrorists side, right? But Rush Limbaugh says that businesses are going to be hurt by this "tax" so GE and Disney will be exempted. They NEED their email. And [insert powerful liberal equivalent of Rush here] will point out that the health care industry NEEDS its email, so that will be exempt, too. To make up the shortfall, we'll have to raise it to a dime.

Once you allow the government to tax your email, you are foolish if you think it will remain at a penny. It is hard to create a new tax. It is easy to raise an existing one.

--
God is real unless declared integer
Re:should charge one cent per email by Sabalon · 2002-03-26 04:12 · Score: 2

I already pay - I pay $27.99 a month to send e-mail, view web pages, etc... why should I pay twice?
Re:should charge one cent per email by Silverhammer · 2002-03-26 05:12 · Score: 2

You've obviously never listened to Rush Limbaugh -- you just made exactly the same argument he would against such a tax.
Re:should charge one cent per email by prizog · 2002-03-26 05:57 · Score: 2

That's a slippery slope argument. Here's a better one:

Linux-Kernel has thousands of members, and hundreds of posts per day. Who will pay the millions of dollars per year for it to go out? Will you let it die, just to avoid spam?

--
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Re:should charge one cent per email by bero-rh · 2002-03-26 08:46 · Score: 2

Either ISPs or a government tax should charge one cent per email. The average user who probably sends less than a dollar's worth per day would hardly notice the charge. The spammer would be paralyzed.

This is a horrible idea. Think of the things you couldn't do anymore...

The linux-kernel mailing list has more than 1000 subscribers, and gets about 300 mails a day.

Running it means sending about 300 * 1000 = 300000 mails a day, which would cost $3000 a day by your suggestion.

The same goes for kde-devel, kde-core-devel and kde-cvs, and probably their equivalents in the gnome world.

Who would pay those? Right, nobody.

Introducing such a thing may not kill Open Source, but it would make it VERY hard. ("What? I'm supposed to PAY to share the fix I've come up with???").

--
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html

Spam and the First Amendment by John+Peterson · 2002-03-26 01:47 · Score: 0, Troll

People who want to ban or regulate spam try to undermine our Freedom of Speech. I say, we have to defend our American freedoms! This guy is a hero!

Re:Spam and the First Amendment by KC7GR · 2002-03-26 02:16 · Score: 1

Spoken like a truely clueless spammer or spam supporter.

Commercial speech is NOT PROTECTED under the 1st Amendment.

Even if it were, the 1st says that CONGRESS shall make no law restricting speech, etc. It says NOTHING -- as in nada, zilch, zero -- about what I, as a SysAdmin who runs his own servers, am compelled to accept or reject, mail-wise. That choice is entirely mine, as should always be the case with private property rights.

Permit me to extend to you a cordial invitation to take your myopic definition of "Frea Speach" (spelled in spammerese for your convenience), and blow it out your eight-inch floppy diskette drive.

--
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,

Blue Feather Technologies
Re:Spam and the First Amendment by hcdejong · 2002-03-26 02:19 · Score: 1

Freedom of speech != freedom to advertise. It's a political, not a commercial freedom.
Re:Spam and the First Amendment by J.+Random+Software · 2002-03-26 04:24 · Score: 1

The US supreme court has somehow decided that the government must overcome higher barriers in order to restrict political speech, but commercial speech is still protected. The First Amendment isn't limited to any particular purpose.
Re:Spam and the First Amendment by KC7GR · 2002-03-27 02:57 · Score: 1

It is? Isn't that interesting. Is that why ads for tobacco and alcohol in billboard space and on TV have pretty much disappeared?

--
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,

Blue Feather Technologies

Do you have any links? by ringbarer · 2002-03-26 01:48 · Score: 0

A detailed account of this righteous culling, along with pathologist photographs, would make a perfect emailable counter response to "XxXxXxXXxX VIAGRA NOW!!! xXxXxXxXXXxX modmfadpf"

Because after all, Spammers love HTML mail too, right?

--
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"

Re:Do you have any links? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 07:18 · Score: 0

Few could be found easily with google:

http://www.iol.ie/~kooltek/deadspam.html
http:/ /slashdot.org/articles/99/10/30/0841215.shtm l

You don't have a physical entity which to contact by Laglorden · 2002-03-26 01:52 · Score: 1

with most other forms of annoying advertising you could contact someone and tell them to go to hell (more or less).

This is not the case with email spam. Sure I could fake a credit card numer (this is illegal though) and order lots of their products?

Any other ideas besides just trying to filter and deleting spam?

I did get hold of one company sending SPAM to me and also the persons mobile phone number who where responsible... Let's just say there are a lot of free services from where you can send SMS *evil smirk*

Must control fist of death... by martin · 2002-03-26 01:52 · Score: 3

I gotta say my first reaction was ahah so that's the (expletive deleted) who started all this.

But then if it wasn't them then it would have been someone else. I get junk mail through my letter box so thid is just the logical extension for the internet.

Sure it's a pain in the bum, a total waste of bandwidth etc but given that the problem lays with ISP's allowing this stuff to go on (ie the spammers are their customers!) I can't see any solution to it (apart from ignoring and deleting it).

Just my 2 pence worth.

Lessening Spam by jhines0042 · 2002-03-26 01:55 · Score: 2

How do you think spam will affect the way we use the Internet in the future?
It's not going to stop us from using (e-mail) because it's such a marvelous form of communication. But something does have to be done to eliminate the unbelievable volume (of spam) that many people get. One would think that it would lessen itself because it's not as effective.

Not as effective?

Not as effective?

Spam costs virtually nothing to send when compared to reaching the same numbers of people with the same message via any other media that even if you get only 1 response per million I'm sure its still an order of magnitude more cost effective than, for example, running an add during the Super Bowl. Anyone have any stats on this? How much does it cost per email to send spam?

--
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.

Re:Lessening Spam by Arimus · 2002-03-26 02:05 · Score: 1

Spam isn't all that effective really though - you lose good will of your spamees - the spam is more of a scatter gun approach that direct mailing - and for one I've never clicked on a spam link or brought any thing off spam...

Effectivness = more than just the price of the mailing...

--
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Re:Lessening Spam by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:31 · Score: 0

If I had a few hundred dollars to blow, I'd start spamming on the behalf of Red Hat software.

That would be fun. Get all kinds of people pissed off at Red Hat.

And since we all know how important the 'right' to anonymous email sending capabilities are, it'd be my right to do so.

Look... by xtermz · 2002-03-26 01:55 · Score: 5, Funny

...Stop harping on the guy. If it wasnt for him, I'ld still be bald, my wang wouldnt be 20-30% bigger, my vast real-estate empire would be nothing, and my hot willing wife from asia would still be over there picking rice...

God bless the spam...it changed my life

--

I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.

Re:Look... by CaptainSuperBoy · 2002-03-26 03:57 · Score: 2

I too have benefitted from spam.. I now have 8 diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities, I accept 24 different credit cards, and I've refinanced my morgatge 11 times. I can also find out any secret about anyone using this powerful software I bought.

But so would by Karen_Frito · 2002-03-26 01:56 · Score: 2

legitimate businesses who use email for a variety of purposes.

I get my phone and internet bill through email -- so I can pay online from work instead of trying to weasel time in at home.

I am on several mailing lists that go out to hundreds of people -- if I send an email that goes to hundreds, is that one cent, or hundreds of cents? Who gets billed? Me, my ISP, the host of the list?

There -ARE- legimate email-marketing businesses. Who do opt-in, double-subscribe, instant unsubscribe lists.

---

Why should we penalize EVERYONE for the actions of some assholes who can't remember how to get permission first?

--

http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385

Re:But so would by lifey · 2002-03-26 02:40 · Score: 1

OMG! Someone is defending spam. This is either flamebait (That is my guess) or a true real life spammer (also pretty likely).

There is NO legitimate e-mail marketing business. Period. (Ok.. I really am easy to bite on the trolls. Sue me.) There are legitimate business use of e-mail. I use it 100x a day to talk to co-workers, ask for help, etc. At home, I use it to talk to my mom, and e-mail my great aunt Dororthy. Oh wait, my great aunt Dorothy can't use e-mail. She almost has a heart attact when she opens the computer and gets deluged by Free HOT XXX TITTIES!@#$# and WACTH MY TEEN FILIPINA DAUGHTER SERVICE THE BUTLER!*$&@

My penis is just the right size, I don't like girls, I have all my hair, I can get it up. I DON'T NEED SPAM!!! These are the people that have fouled the internet. There are also the same people that made e-mail NOT a respectable medium for ads. Noone is going to trust spam. No matter how you package it, no matter what you call it. Death to the spammers (and the lawyer too for that matter).

Oh, and on a side note, Do you really believe that if you click those links at the bottom you will be unsubscribed? HAH! Opt-In, instant unsubscribe, indeed.
Re:But so would by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:57 · Score: 0

Did you read the fucking post?

*Mailing lists* - with real news. If your one email goes to fifty people all interested in, say kernel development, who pays?

No one needs spam, but this is not spam. This is the case of getting an e-mail out to hundreds of people who wanted it. Band newsletters? They're legit. What about e-mails from a university regarding your standing? What about *office-wide* e-mails?

*sigh* I'm a bit to eager to jump on trolls, but there I go.
Re:But so would by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:00 · Score: 0

Many companies offer opt-in mailing lists. An example is bn.com(I haven't been there in a while, so I don't know how much it has changed). You could sign up for a list relating to a certain type of genre of books. Then you would get info on books/products related to that.

eg. Sign up for the New Age list, and in you mail, get some links to books on yoga, and a link to a site where you can purchase yoga equipment(mats, straps, etc).

Opt-out works, unless you've signed up with multiple addresses, or signed up again after opting-out.

simple, legal, and legitimate.

btw. Your great aunt Dorothy needs to chill, you can see stuff almost that bad on billboards these days.

blah
Re:But so would by Karen_Frito · 2002-03-26 03:20 · Score: 2

Buzz. Wrong.

Restaurants and several other 'hospitality' type businesses (amusement parks, casinos, resorts) use email -successfully- (and yes, with the double subscribe AND the unsubscribe link)

I'm subscribed to a few of the lists. Why? Because I bloody well LIKE getting a free dessert from BD's Mongolian BBQ on my birthday!

Because its kinda -cool- to get email from Disney twice a year saying "Hey, bring this to a Disney store, get 10% off. Happy Birthday" (one for each of my kids.)

Yeah, its marketing. Yeah, its EVIL advertising. God forbid they might WANT me to go shop in their stores.

The horror.

Eh. All in all, my kids like their toys, and I got a free chocolate sundae. Maybe I might've eaten there anyway. Maybe not.

--

http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
Re:But so would by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:28 · Score: 0

OMG! Someone is defending spam.

I bet you simultaneously pooped in the back and wet yourself up front, eh?

You and your sort are fucking cranks.
Re:But so would by Dr.Dubious+DDQ · 2002-03-26 05:51 · Score: 2

I'll agree with this - when one WILLINGLY invites a business to communicate with them by email, there's not problem. I'm still allowing (of all people) X-10 to email me (once each day, talk about overkill), since I ordered the $6.00 special introductory "FireCracker interface kit" years ago when they were mentioned on slashdot. I'm waiting for them to have another really good deal on something besides their little spy cameras (a bargain on their two-way computer interface and some indoor motion sensors at a ridiculously low price would be nice. More toys for me.)...

What's really funny to me is that I just yesterday(!) got around to finally hooking up the "FireCracker" kit. I can at least say that it works, and was well worth the $6.00 I paid for it...

To get back to the original topic, though, I think the original poster MEANT that there were no legitimate "unsolicited" email marketing programs (in an age when nearly everyone gets ONLY unsolicited advertisements, it's easy to forget that there are a few rare, legitimate solicited ones out there as well)...

--
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Re:But so would by Karen_Frito · 2002-03-26 06:01 · Score: 2

Except that the post I had made specified that the email marketing programs I had seen were opt-in and double-confirm.

*shrugs*

No accounting for folks who can't read, I suppose.

--

http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385

Surviving Lawyer? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 01:57 · Score: 0

I missed one? Not for long.

Then fuck the first Amendment by Laglorden · 2002-03-26 01:57 · Score: 1

If your first amendment gives someone the "freedom" to pester me with endless spam, then I suggest you change it and replace it with something better...

Moral justification by briggsb · 2002-03-26 01:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

Do you have any regrets about sending the spam?
I don't think so. Given the same set of circumstance--the same time, the stage of the Internet--I'd probably do the same thing. Somebody would have done it, if we hadn't done it.

Great moral justification - no surprise that this came from a lawyer. "But judge somebody was gonna steal that money if my client hadn't."

Re:Moral justification by mizhi · 2002-03-26 07:19 · Score: 2

Look Your Honor, the guy was a complete asshole... If I didn't kill him, them someone else would have!

--
Humorless sig goes here.

Siegel died? by Seth+Finkelstein · 2002-03-26 02:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

and Siegel died in 2001

Is this true? I went looking for the obituary, but could not find it. I'd have thought there would be some notice. I wondered if the obituary would have mentioned her as the "co-inventor" of spam (what a thing to be remembered for, in one's life ...)

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Re:Siegel died? by Tackhead · 2002-03-26 02:15 · Score: 5, Funny

> Is this true? I went looking for the obituary, but could not find it. I'd have thought there would be some notice. I wondered if the obituary would have mentioned her as the "co-inventor" of spam (what a thing to be remembered for, in one's life ...)
I guess they were afraid the cemetery wouldn't have enough room for the mile-long line of geeks waiting their turn to, uh, "offer their respects", in the form of what I'll delicately call a libation.
Re:Siegel died? by jejones · 2002-03-26 02:15 · Score: 2

You know, I should feel bad to hear that Ms. Siegel is no longer with us, but I can't say that I do.
Re:Siegel died? by Seth+Finkelstein · 2002-03-26 02:29 · Score: 2

I was thinking various ways of ending the phrase
"In lieu of flowers, contributions were send to ...",
or
"The ashes were ..."
But that would be cruel.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Re:Siegel died? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:41 · Score: 0

I should feel bad to hear that Ms. Siegel is no longer with us, but I can't say that I do

I do feel bad about her being dead, because that means I'll never get a chance to slap her in the face. The article says Canter is in SF Bay Area -- could someone over on the left coast slap him for me? If you can post a photo of it I'll buy you a present.
Re:Siegel died? by jonerik · 2002-03-26 03:28 · Score: 2

and Siegel died in 2001

One down, one to go....
Re:Siegel died? by pigeon · 2002-03-26 03:43 · Score: 1

I have the same feeling. She's dead. She was a spammer. Good. Good spammers are dead spammers, and how good it is to be able to ventilate my frustrations here.
Re:Siegel died? by PD · 2002-03-26 05:08 · Score: 1

Who's that Belgian that pied Bill Gates? Certainly Slashdot could scape together enough cash to hire that guy to pie Canter.

--
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.

email spam is just 'new' method for old marketing. by gl4ss · 2002-03-26 02:05 · Score: 1

ever got advertisiments in snail-mail? i bet you did.. i bet you did get spam there before you even had email.. not to mention phone spam.. phone spam is the WORST kind of spam, since you have to pick up the phone to hear some guy trying to sell you some useless mags..

--
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.

creative penalties by Alien54 · 2002-03-26 02:05 · Score: 2

at least this one should have to shake the hand of eveyone one ever pissed by spam, or something.

He should have publicity. Lots of it. He should be well known as the man who invented spam,complete with photos, etc.

There should be dartboards with his face on it.

People would probably boycott him on this basis. I know I would.

--
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"

Re:creative penalties by Alien54 · 2002-03-26 02:12 · Score: 2

Do you still receive hate mail today? No, not in a long time. Maybe that will change if my whereabouts are known. I've been keeping a rather low profile in recent years.
Canter hasn't practiced law since 1995. Six years ago, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he's been developing software to help traders analyze stock options.
I am sure that some newspaper in the SF/SJ area would be more than happy to feature his face in an article.

--
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Re:creative penalties by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:52 · Score: 0

I'll see about getting an ad.

But I will change the locality slightly, and slip in a picture of Linus Torvalds instead.

"Here is the guy responsible for rhe rise of spam."

We won't even have to deport the fellah when his green card expires.
Re:creative penalties by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 08:48 · Score: 0

now that's funny...

I despise spam, too, but... by mlas · 2002-03-26 02:07 · Score: 3, Insightful

...it's really irrelevant who cast the first stone. Looking back, the commercialization of the Internet (incl. Usenet, email, the Web) seems more like a historical inevitability. If it wasn't Canter and Siegel, it would have been someone else two weeks later, guaranteed. The network was simply too rich and too full of potential at that point in time to not be mined for profit.

Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon. However, had this fundamentalist purity somehow miraculously stayed intact, most of us would probably be out of a job today. I know I would.

Canter and Siegel's place in history will be less on the magnitude of Jimi Hendrix, and more like the name of the first concertgoer through the gates at Woodstock-- a piece of trivia at a historical event.

--
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey

Re:I despise spam, too, but... by smallpaul · 2002-03-26 03:13 · Score: 2

Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon. However, had this fundamentalist purity somehow miraculously stayed intact, most of us would probably be out of a job today. I know I would.

It is not right to treat PULL information sources like web sites as analogous to PUSH information sources. The commercialization was never the problem for any but a tiny fraction of people. If you had done a "Canter and Siegel" about the Israeli/Palestinian question you would have been flamed also. The only reason that commercialism made it worse is because it was clear that if there was profit in it there would be no end to it.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... by jonerik · 2002-03-26 03:33 · Score: 2

...it's really irrelevant who cast the first stone. Looking back, the commercialization of the Internet (incl. Usenet, email, the Web) seems more like a historical inevitability.

So is war, but that doesn't mean I want to give a free pass to the people who start one.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... by sunhou · 2002-03-26 04:01 · Score: 2

I agree, if they hadn't done it, someone else would have.

But for those of us who were there and lived through the firestorm following, the names Canter and Siegel will be forever burned into our memories. When it was happening, I knew the internet was about to take a serious turn, and that we'd never go back to the way things were, for better or worse.

And yeah, who knows if history will recall the names Canter and Siegel 100 years from now. But it was a pretty significant event -- the first large-scale commercial advertisement on the internet! Tell your kids or grandkids in 10 or 20 or 30 years that you were there for that. They'll look at you the same way you'd look at a great-grandparent that says they remember when the first person on their block got a telephone or television.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... by EisPick · 2002-03-26 04:38 · Score: 3, Informative

Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon

They weren't unwritten rules intially. When the NSF was still funding part costs of the backbone (through '94 or so IIRC), the feds required you to sign an "Acceptible Use Policy" to get a feed from an ISP. This AUP applied to all users, even on .com domains. It prohibited any sort of commercial solicitations. The only commerical activity allowed was things like distribution of subscription content. You could fulfill subscriptions on the Internet, but you couldn't solicit them.

As I recall, the ISPs were in charge of enforcing the AUP. In those days there were fewer of them around, so the threat of losing one's feed from any one ISP might mean having no other option to reconnect, so the threat was taken seriously.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... by J.+Random+Software · 2002-03-26 04:38 · Score: 1

The official NSFNet terms of service forbade commercial use. The rules were hardly "unwritten", just not thoroughly enforced. Even when CIX formed a commerce-friendly backbone, everyone knew some commercial traffic would leak into shorter paths through NSFNet, which meant some peer had violated the terms of service, but they didn't want to require that everyone buy two routers to make sure that didn't happen.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... by Frater+219 · 2002-03-26 04:53 · Score: 2

Looking back, the commercialization of the Internet (incl. Usenet, email, the Web) seems more like a historical inevitability.

Perhaps this is a nitpick, but spamming isn't "the commercialization of the Internet." Commercialization is a matter of something being used for trade, which is a voluntary exchange between two parties. Spamming isn't voluntary on the part of the recipient (or recipient's mail host) -- it's an expense forced upon the recipient by the sender. That's trespass and involuntary conversion, not commercialization.
Yes, the Internet has become commercialized. The first examples of that were UUNET and the other early ISPs -- selling Internet access was a new thing once upon a time. Another example would be the commercialization of the Web -- the rise of online stores and the like. Another would be banner ads, which differ from spam in that they are not "pushed" at the recipient; the recipient instructs his computer to download them by viewing a Web page.
Spam isn't commerce. It's crime. Let's not malign honest businesspeople by conflating them with those who "advertise" by spray-painting on other people's property.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... by edunbar93 · 2002-03-26 07:15 · Score: 2

Canter and Siegel's place in history will be less on the magnitude of Jimi Hendrix, and more like the name of the first concertgoer through the gates at Woodstock-- a piece of trivia at a historical event.

I beg to differ. These clowns weren't just the first through the floodgates, they were the ones who opened them too. Not only did they make a fortune doing what they did, they set an example. They were the poster boys for every spammer to come afterwards. "Look! That guy made $100,000 in two weeks doing this! I should try that too!" said 1000 potential spammers the very next day.

And then a little while later, they wrote and published a book that not only explained *how* to do it, but that it was okay to do it, that it was their right to free speech or something to advertise the sleaziest possible scams to alt.sex because "the sort of people in there are as morally bankrupt as you anyway" or some bullshit.

This prick deserves to be forced to read every last one of those 300 spam e-mailings he gets every day.

--
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Re:I despise spam, too, but... by catfood · 2002-03-26 09:06 · Score: 2

However, had this fundamentalist purity somehow miraculously stayed intact, most of us would probably be out of a job today. I know I would.

Your job depends on spamming?
Oh, you mean it doesn't? So tell me again what Canter and Siegel did for "commerce"?
Re:I despise spam, too, but... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 15:29 · Score: 0

yes, that is freaking hilarious!! If you were not a webmaster or whatever you do would be administering a LAN of Windows 5.0 machinesq right about now

Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. by sdo1 · 2002-03-26 02:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

Canter wrote: But something does have to be done to eliminate the unbelievable volume (of spam) that many people get.

Apparantly his parents were lacking in teaching him morals. My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing. Before you toss that gum wrapper out of the car window, think about what the street would look like if everyone did it. Before you say something nasty to someone, think about how you'd feel if the rolls were reversed."

It's pretty basic stuff. I can't tell you how many spammers I've confronted via email (I report every spam I get) only to be told "Lighten up jerk! It's only one email. My response is always "Yea, but what if every business on the planet did what you did?"

I'll never understand spammers. They seem to be almost universally lacking in the ability to tell right from wrong. That Canter's excuse is "if I hadn't done it, someone else would have, so it's OK" only shows that he too is lacking in that ability.

-S

--
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?

Re:Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. by west · 2002-03-26 02:17 · Score: 2

My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing. Before you toss that gum wrapper out of the car window, think about what the street would look like if everyone did it.

"Well, I was going to take the 401 into work today, but with 6 billion people on it, maybe I'll stick with the subway..."
Re:Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:22 · Score: 0

...I'll stick with the subway..."

Sounds like a good idea for lunch. Thanks!
Re:Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:28 · Score: 0

think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing
I was going to take the 401 into work today

Which is why DC (and LA, and NYC, etc) traffic is so bad. Most people don't follow the Kantian ideal.
Re:Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:34 · Score: 0

Yep.

That sandwich shop is the closest you'll ever come to having a subway out in dirtpatch Idaho.

Look at the cool wallpaper with pictures of New York. It means you feel oh so very cosmopolitan, eh?

Better hurry back to your dirt hole and start digging again, lunch is over.
Re:Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. by RPoet · 2002-03-26 07:17 · Score: 2

My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing.

That's a horrible standard for morals. It's quite clear that if all the world was homosexual, man would be extinct. Or that if all the world lived in your little village, or were IT proessionals or any of the things that make you you, it would likely be the end of the world. That doesn't make those things examples of bad morals!

--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Re:Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. by sdo1 · 2002-03-26 08:25 · Score: 1

You're right to a certain extent, and it's certainly not a universal test for the morality of any action. But it does apply to cases like this. The question is "would the world be a better or worse place if everyone made the same decision as you're about to make." The person throwing a small bit of trash out the car window can justify their actions in their own mind by saying "Yea, but it's OK since not everyone does it and it's not a big deal."

The point is that when you justify your actions by using that excuse, you have to ask yourself "Yea, but if everyone DID to it?"

Spammers can justify their wrongdoing in their own mind by saying "it's just one message", but it's when they use that excuse that they should apply that test.

-S

--
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Re:Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. by bentini · 2002-03-26 08:26 · Score: 2

Are your parents Immanuel Kant and his theory of the moral imperative?

Yeah... Whatever. by ringbarer · 2002-03-26 02:07 · Score: 0

And Bin Laden isn't responsible for 9/11. It's the actions of random Terrorists, right.

Remember, that in the eyes of the subhuman loathsome, desperate wretches that attend Mass Marketing Seminars, Canter and Siegel are worshipped as GODS!

Mass Marketing, Pyramid Schemes, Green Card ventures, all boil down to the one thing... MEMETIC CULTS! Is it any wonder that the first big Spam was related to Green Cards? What are Canter and Siegel doing with all these foreigners, new to the country? WHERE ARE THEY???

I'll tell you where they are. They're on the end of your telephone, demanding that you change service provider when all you want to do after a hard day's work is eat your dinner and spend time with your family.

They're the low-brow ignorant video store clerks, keeping you waiting for half an hour while they try to find the original tape of "Ass Pounders 7" to slip into the case of "Monsters Inc." you've been wanting to rent for your kids.

And they're at the other end of the gun pointed at your children.

This is Canter and Siegel's hidden army. In league with Anti-Americal interests, they have been allowed into this country, underskilled and unable to learn how to assimilate themselves into our fine culture.

They grow bitter, despondent. They seek vengence on the very values this country thrives on. You honestly think Scientology is the problem? Do you?

Spam is the spearhead of an attack on our virtues. NOBODY replies to Spam. The purpose isn't for 'marketing' at all, no matter what the seminars would have the gullible and desperate believe.

The purpose of Spam is to eat away like a cancer of everything that is decent. Advertising filthy pornography and degrading acts. Clogging up company networks so that they are unable to do business. Demoralising the individuals who receive thousands of these mails a day. Making a travesty of our legal system by demanding rights of 'free speech' when their sole purpose is to drown out all other forms of legitimate communication.

THIS is the legacy of Canter and Siegel. And it is by these means that they seek their Power and Dominion over their fellow man. The vanguard of an assault on everything that is decent.

They deserve to be executed. To set an example. Cut off the head and the serpent shall wither and die.

They are responsible for a terrorist cult far, FAR worse than the Branch Davidians.

We must be vigilant, and we must be prepared to strike back.

--
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"

Eh? by MrFredBloggs · 2002-03-26 02:10 · Score: 2, Insightful

"To most people, Compuserve *did* come before the Internet"

Quack quack quack.

Re:Eh? by siemce · 2002-03-26 03:59 · Score: 1

That's true, I used to know a lot of people having access to compuserve through corporate accounts and all they knew were compuserve chats, message boards, etc.
Also, compuserve was warining you if you wanted to go out to the internet like something bad was happening and you really should reconsider your request :)
fun fun fun

class action, anyone? by eshefer · 2002-03-26 02:12 · Score: 1, Troll

I'm wondering whether a class action can be litegated on this guy for starting spamming.. Would serve this lawyer right...

Proof that Perl is Evil by wiredog · 2002-03-26 02:13 · Score: 4, Funny

It was with a fairly simple script, a Perl script,

That's right, the first usenet spam was sent with a Perl script. We must stop the spread of tools, such as perl, that allow this sort of evil.

And, since perl makes no attempt to stop spam, or evil hackers copying DVD's, we must souppport the CBDTPAYHBTYHLHAND legislation that will put a stop to the evil that is perl!

--

Best Slashdot Co

Re:Proof that Perl is Evil by Matts · 2002-03-26 03:11 · Score: 2

Seems to me you got it wrong. Perl makes great attempts to stop spam. :-)

--

Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Re:Proof that Perl is Evil by McD · 2002-03-26 07:05 · Score: 1

"People misuse Perl too--if you can call spammers people. Perl is the language of choice for network abuse. That doesn't mean Perl isn't a net win for the world."
--Larry Wall, Third Annual State Of The Onion address, 1999
Peace,
-McD

--
"Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." -- Calvin

Thinking backwards? by marnanel · 2002-03-26 02:13 · Score: 3, Insightful

From the article: The Usenet, to my way of thinking, is very different than e-mail because it's not something that's just coming to you.

Isn't he thinking backwards here? Here's a clue: people have to store and transmit Usenet posts, just like they do with email, and they have to pay for the time and the storage, just like they do with email. The only difference from email for our purposes is in the opposite direction from that which he implies.

So when he says that Usenet spam isn't something that's "just coming to you", he's confusing the issue: the real difference from email spam is that it's not coming just to you. The spammer gets to make thousands of people pay to read their one ad, instead of having to go to the trouble of sending an individual message for each one.

You're going to these message boards for whatever reason,

Sure. And 99 times out of a hundred it isn't to get told about how to find a green card.

and although it may be true that mass posting to every Usenet group in sight wasn't good, I still don't see how it is nearly as intrusive as receiving 300 pornographic e-mail solicitations every day

Which makes it quite all right, of course.

<bad-taste> "News.com has an interview today with the surviving lawyer who spammed Usenet with multiple "Green Card Lottery" posts in '94."

You mean someone got the other one? :) </bad-taste>

--
GROGGS: alive and well and living in

Ah, memories ... or Canter & Siegel classics by Seth+Finkelstein · 2002-03-26 02:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

Ah, memories ... (I was one of those "MIT thugs")

In spite of the reprehensible tactics of the MIT thugs, mass posting to USENET remains a profitable way to market to the huge majority of people on the Internet who do not share the warped MIT mentality. Every day more and more businesses are mass posting to USENET because it is effective. It is particularly beneficial to small businesses, which our government has an interest in fostering. If Cybersell's connection to the Internet were to be eliminated, the advertising posted to USENET every day would still continue and grow. Our company would also continue on, advising businesses of how to advertise through their own accounts, just as Mr. Boyle did.
The public is becoming increasingly aware and intolerant of academic institutions who support the dissemination of pornography and the commission of computer crimes as exercises in free speech but act sociopathically in response to advertising. This set of values is not reflective of the beliefs of most Americans. In this regard, an investigation of MIT and their flagrant negligence in turning a blind eye to the misuses of their system is long overdue. Meanwhile, Cybersell stands behind all its actions as being both legal and highly successful business pursuits. We continue to encourage others to follow the path we are cutting through this virtual war zone.
Laurence A. Canter
Martha S. Siegel
Cybersell (tm)

Who knew then, what we know now ... especially that remark about a "virtual war zone" ...

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Origin of the word "Spam" by Redwing · 2002-03-26 02:38 · Score: 1

The Jargon File has a good entry for the multiple meanings of the word "spam". But they only speak briefly about how the term began to be applied.

[from "Monty Python's Flying Circus"]

...the term `spam' has gone mainstream, though without its original sense or folkloric freight - there is apparently a widespread myth among lusers that "spamming" is what happens when you dump cans of Spam into a revolving fan.

I have heard another story claiming that spam (messages) drown out legitimate discourse the way the vikings' song drowns out conversation at the restaurant.

My belief had always been, however, that it was the fact that the messages were not crossposted. This meant you got multiple copies of the same message to all the usenet servers. This is like ordering "spam spam spam eggs and spam".

--
Raisinettes are my raison d'etre

Re:Origin of the word "Spam" by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:38 · Score: 0

Hasn't anybody taken the Jargon File away from Airsick Raymond yet? When he hijacked it and warped it to fit with his neo-pagan ideology nobody complained. It's high time someone took it away from him and made it back into an open database that doesn't push someone's politics.
Re:Origin of the word "Spam" by J.+Random+Software · 2002-03-26 04:53 · Score: 1

It's in the public domain. Feel free to fork it. Don't get your hopes up, though--his politics have a lot in common with most geeks' (which is probably why he put them in!)
Re:Origin of the word "Spam" by Anne+Thwacks · 2002-03-26 11:05 · Score: 1

In the olden days, during and shortly after WW2, food was rationed in England. As a result, it was common for restaurants to offer menus with all kinds of exotic food, but when you ordered "Lobster and Caviar", you would be told "Lobster's off today", and so on down the menu, until you got to Spam and Eggs. The ration of Spam was so huge, no one could ever use it up. So Spam was never off.
Peter Sellers did a comedy sketch about this in about 1954, which was later released on his album "The Best of Sellers", together with the sketich about "Balham, Gateway to the south" - a spoof on Travelogues (you don't need to know about this, trust me:-)
Another sketch on the same album, more relevant perhaps was the children's radio show feature ...
Up on the chair behind the door,
hey diddle diddle
Here comes Papa, so up with the chopper, and
Split 'im down the middle
Now children, gather up all of Daddy's nasty stocks and shares, and send them to me at ...
Anyway, to get back on topic, the point of Spam was that you always got it, what ever you ACTUALLY ordered.
However, the reference is lost on anyone who wasnt in England in the 1950's.

--
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII

Re:That's correct by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 02:44 · Score: 0

Geez, what a crank.

Hitler stood for the same kind of nutcase 'all other ideas are wrong and should be crushed' ideology as the 9/11 terrorists.

Hitler himself wasn't even a German.

Antisocial by Raedwald · 2002-03-26 02:47 · Score: 3, Informative

IANAP (I Am Not a Psychologist!), but check Sociopathy.

'[psychopaths have a personality that] emasculates the constraining force of social rules: people for whom... the idea of a common good is merely a puzzling and inconvenient abstraction.' Canter says 'Seems that back then the Internet was more or less the private playpen of academics and geeks, and any commercial solicitations were considered off limits.' That sounds like a bunch of inconvenient soial rules. Check 1
'Groups high on psychopathy include... high-pressure salesmen and stock promoters... unethical lawyers...' Check 2
'... psychopaths are characterised by an absence of remorse or any conception that their behaviours ought to be changed.' In reply to the question 'Do you have any regrets about sending the spam?' Canter says 'I don't think so. Given the same set of circumstance--the same time, the stage of the Internet--I'd probably do the same thing.' Check 3

Also check out Antisocial Personality Disorder.

--
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.

Re:Antisocial by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:56 · Score: 0

By that definition, Thomas Paine, and most of the founders of our county where psychopaths.

Well, er, atleast they didn't recognize the "public good" as anything governments should be envolved with.

Spam on Usenet is controllable by Colin+Smith · 2002-03-26 02:48 · Score: 2

I take great pleasure having spammers accounts pulled. No, not their pretend disposable accounts. I mean the people buying the advertising.

We've found that ISPs are quite willing to pull accounts when several hundred people complain about a spam. It can also be fun having an ISP's connection shut down.

--
Deleted

Re:Spam on Usenet is controllable by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:09 · Score: 0

Phone calls are effective, especially when researching all relevant phone numbers for those responsible at 2am in the morning.

Former Internet Direct owner's comment.. by cowmix · 2002-03-26 02:50 · Score: 5, Informative

> So they were fully aware of your intentions from the start?
>
> What always made us mad was that they always knew what we were
> doing before we did it. Then they denied the whole thing. We
> set up our accounts with them initially for the purpose of
> doing this.

As former owner of Internet Direct, please allow me to set the
record straight.

At the time most of our accounts (like the C&S account) were
dial up shell and SLIP accounts. We were setting up at least
30 - 50 accounts a day so to say that we knew each customers
intentions for their account's use is totally not right.

About four weeks before the incident, C&S did visit our offices and
they met with my business partner Bill Fisher. They started to
ask vague questions about our capacity and if we offered
programming consulting services. Bill started to figure out
where they were starting to go with their line of questioning
and he told them that we would not help them with any
spamming activities. Bill then referred C&S to the AUP document
they signed when they joined they service and they left our
offices.

From that time to the day of the incident, they found an
independent programmer to create the scripts to do the
mass spamming.

> They terminated our account in a very short period
> of time, a matter of days. And there was a lot of mail that we
> were really never able to get. We guessed there were 25,000 to
> 50,000 e-mails that never got to us. We eventually got a hard
> disk from them some months later that had it all on there, but
> we were never completely successful at pulling the data off of
> it.

We delivered to their lawyer a 4mm DAT tape two days after the
incident. I believe all the info was encoded in ROT 13. :)

Re:Former Internet Direct owner's comment.. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:13 · Score: 1, Funny

We guessed there were 25,000 to 50,000 e-mails that never got to us.

Wow, a lawyer being denied the opportunity to read 50,000 of his own death threats. The tragedy.
Re:Former Internet Direct owner's comment.. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:16 · Score: 0

Let history show that Leigh Benson, fuckup extraordinaire, was the person who actually made the first usenet spamming a reality. Barely capable of writing english, much less writing code, he had to find someone else to actually do the work, as usual.
Re:Former Internet Direct owner's comment.. by husker_man · 2002-03-26 08:43 · Score: 1

I can add to this mix somewhat. At a previous company, we got buried under this junk when it came it - took some time to figure it out, and then eliminate it.

Later that year (1994), I was the systems administrator for a number of systems, including free.org (slogan: get online for just a penny. Long distance, though) This jerk signed up for a free account, and proceeded to spam away. I stopped it after a bit, and had to put some hacks into my systems to stop the spam. The idiot had the gall to ask why I was blocking his spam. I had to direct him to the Acceptable Use Policy that he signed up under, while I was deleting his accounts (multiple of them, unfortunately - but he wasn't too smart in setting them up!)
Re:Former Internet Direct owner's comment.. by ryantate · 2002-03-26 10:52 · Score: 2

Bill started to figure out where they were starting to go with their line of questioning and he told them that we would not help them with any spamming activities. Bill then referred C&S to the AUP document they signed when they joined they service and they left our offices.

So if a> you were already on the lookout for spam and b>there was already an anti-spam clause in your contract boilerplate, why is this guy being held up as some kind of spam pioneer/pariah? Spam must have already been out there-- people were already either doing this or thinking about it. I don't understand what's special about these guys, I must be missing some information.
Re:Former Internet Direct owner's comment.. by marko123 · 2002-03-26 15:31 · Score: 1

IIRC, Canter and Siegel's claim to fame was spamming every channel on usenet with the same unsolicited, off-topic advertisement. I think they were the first to do that. The pricks.

--
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood

Nothing wrong with paying for something used by pyramid+termite · 2002-03-26 03:00 · Score: 2

I think a rate where 1,000 emails a month would be free and then 1c an email would be good. One could quibble about the price, I guess, but the principle is a sound one.

I get my phone and internet bill through email -- so I can pay online from work instead of trying to weasel time in at home.

It'd still be less than what they'd pay the US mail.

I am on several mailing lists that go out to hundreds of people -- if I send an email that goes to hundreds, is that one cent, or hundreds of cents?

If you're sending it to a central server, it's one cent.

Who gets billed? Me, my ISP, the host of the list?

You get billed once and when your host sends out the daily digest, he gets billed once. That would be no more than 31 emails a month, so with the first 1,000 free, he wouldn't be paying anyway.

There -ARE- legimate email-marketing businesses. Who do opt-in, double-subscribe, instant unsubscribe lists.

It would be part of the cost of doing business. It's cheaper than snail mail or phone calls.

Why should we penalize EVERYONE for the actions of some assholes who can't remember how to get permission first?

It's not a penalization of everyone - most people don't send 1,000 emails a month. And it's not penalizing those who do - it's asking them to pay for a service they're using heavily. It would have the added benefit of making spam expensive and unprofitable.

Re:Nothing wrong with paying for something used by Karen_Frito · 2002-03-26 03:30 · Score: 2

Okay, lets take this a little more personally.

I get my slashdot responses in email. How many responses are posted PER article, per day?

--

The return on bulk mail via the Post Office is -maybe- one in 10,000.

And that makes a profit on the rates the Post Office charge.

A one-cent tax won't stop spam, it won't halt spam, it won't slow spam.

It'll just mean that everyone ELSE will have a harder time sending email.

(and as for 1,000 emails a month, well, just on average, I send 100 a -day-. Tech support. LOTS of emails. And that doens't count the personal ones.)

Additionally - it won't work.

Why? Because like you just said -- you send one email, you get charged one cent. The email goes to multiple people -- do you get changed multiple cents? Then mailing lists get penalized. Because daily digests are a pain to read -- and if you FORCE daily digests on everyone, you punish everyone for the spam of a few -- AND -- its still a -very- large number on a large scale list.

--

http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385

Did the interviewer pay attention? by Spit_Fire1 · 2002-03-26 03:01 · Score: 1

I seems the interviewer didn't care what he said, and was just asking the questions he/she wanted to,
Do you still use e-mail as a way of sending commercial messages to a mass audience?
i gathered that he used USENet not e-mail.
So, you're not sending unsolicited e-mail anymore?
I've never heard usenet being called e-mail.

--

"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis

Warning: poor taste joke ahead by Eccles · 2002-03-26 03:06 · Score: 1

News.com has an interview today with the surviving lawyer who spammed Usenet with multiple "Green Card Lottery" posts in '94."

Well at least we got one of them...

--
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.

So in essence by CaptainZapp · 2002-03-26 03:09 · Score: 2

You're telling me, that if I want to make a statement by crapping on your living room carpet, this is my first amendment right ?

Yeah, I think we have a deal...

--
ich bin der musikant

mit taschenrechner in der hand

kraftwerk

So in summary... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 03:11 · Score: 0

You send a hundred e-mails a day asking coworkers for help and you can get it up but don't like girls.

And you think that spam's your biggest problem?

But remember by wiredog · 2002-03-26 03:16 · Score: 2

Both slash and scoop are written in perl.

--

Best Slashdot Co

Poor interview end by roystgnr · 2002-03-26 03:19 · Score: 2

CNET made their last question "Has the spam incident helped or harmed your career path?", when I'm sure we were all more interested in the answer to "(sound of gun cocking) Have you made your peace with God, Mr. Canter?"

Whoops! Half-awake! by pyramid+termite · 2002-03-26 03:25 · Score: 2

You get billed once and when your host sends out the daily digest, he gets billed once. That would be no more than 31 emails a month, so with the first 1,000 free, he wouldn't be paying anyway.

Well, actually with a mailing list of 100 people, say, he would be sending 3100 emails a month and would pay. Still, there are other ways things like this could be done.

Google is your friend by saridder · 2002-03-26 03:35 · Score: 1

Here's the original post as found on Google:

Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.

The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a
permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.

PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.

The only countries NOT qualifying are: Mexico; India; P.R. China;
Taiwan, Philippines, North Korea, Canada, United Kingdom (except
Northern Ireland), Jamaica, Domican Republic, El Salvador and
Vietnam.

Lottery registration will take place soon. 55,000 Green Cards will be
given to those who register correctly. NO JOB IS REQUIRED.

THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS
NOW!!

For FREE information via Email, send request to
cslaw@indirect.com

--
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.

Nightmare by pigeon · 2002-03-26 03:39 · Score: 1

.. when you meet the love of your life.. and she turns out to be a spammer!

Next interview: Dave Rhodes by Sloppy · 2002-03-26 04:06 · Score: 2

What's Dave up to these days? (Was he even a real person?)

--
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.

This guy is SCUM!!! by dmarx · 2002-03-26 04:10 · Score: 1

He says that me might consider sending out MORE spam. My proposal: create a new circle in Hell just for him. He can spend eternity deluged in invitations to "MAKE MONEY FAST", get "Free Cable-Legaly!!!", and view "BARELY LEGAL XXX GIRLS".

--
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"

Quick, offtopic question. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 04:16 · Score: 0

What does "get it" or "doesn't get it" actually mean to the Linux world? The way it's used when, say, another company moves away from open source in an attempt to make money gives one cause to believe that it means "doesn't agree with me" instead of an actual lack of understanding. And yet, in cases like the above, it seems to be used appropriately (e.g. "doesn't understand"). Is this one of those things that changes in value depending upon whom it benefits (like government intervention)?

Just curious.

Re:email spam is just 'new' method for old marketi by Jack+Hughes · 2002-03-26 04:23 · Score: 1

Yeah.. but that snail-mail for that new credit card:

Doesn't use someone else's franking machine so that they don't have to pay for it
isn't written on a stolen letter head so that you don't know who really sent it
doesn't have "cum see the hot girl on girl lesbian animal action" written on the envelope.

also, snail mail spamming costs the sender - it is in their interest to send to people who they think might be a bit interested in the s ervice

Re:Ah, memories ... or Canter & Siegel classic by SweenyTod · 2002-03-26 04:37 · Score: 2

I don't know the story.

What exactly did you do to him?

--
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo

Question (off main topic) by CrazyDuke · 2002-03-26 04:43 · Score: 1

Question: Who's Wheaties did I piss in this morning?

--
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.

Timely /. Item? by ScottKin · 2002-03-26 04:55 · Score: 1

As the article is being posted, a listserv for an open-source project is being spammed by some clever putz who figured-out how to forge mail headers and send them via a live, working member's email address.

The LiteStep maillist has been severely spammed by gibberish posts for the last 48 hours, to the ammount of over 18,000 emails.

(for those who don't know what LiteStep is; it's an open-source Shell replacement for Windows' SHELL32.DLL, and the more popular of the open-source Shell Replacements)

The admin that runs the maillist is away from his office and is unable to immediately deal with the problem. The listadmin has a fairly good idea where it's coming from, and I'm not really at liberty to divulge that info at this time, but if ANYONE in the /. community has any ideas, we'd appreciate it and any support.

You can get more info on this at http://www.shellfront.org

Thanks!

ScottKin

--
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!

From segfault - Last human leaves Usenet by JimmytheGeek · 2002-03-26 04:59 · Score: 1

Now it's nothing but spambots and cancelbots.

(That's the idea- the actual story was an excellent paragraph. Come back, Segfault!)

One of the original spammers is dead? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 05:01 · Score: 0

Good.

Must be the devil himself. by Webmoth · 2002-03-26 05:05 · Score: 2

This man is unabashedly associated with the two most despised groups in the history of mankind: lawyers and spammers. More than just associated, he is called the "the father of modern spam."

Must be the devil himself.

--
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.

Re:Yeah... Whatever. by PD · 2002-03-26 05:06 · Score: 1

I say we kill him.

No, first we drown him, them we kill him.

NO, first we shoot him, THEN we drown him, then we kill him.

(Canter, in an imitation of Pee Wee Herman's voice) I say you give him to me!

--
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.

You don't need surgery. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 05:29 · Score: 0

There's a pill that will at 2-3 inches without the need for costly and dangerous surgery. There's another one that will increase your ejaculation by over 500%.

Re:Yeah... Whatever. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 05:36 · Score: 0

Hangin's too good for him! Burnin's too good for him! He should be ripped into little pieces and buried alive!

Please mod parent up by Batou · 2002-03-26 05:39 · Score: 1

This raises a very good point on spamming as a means of promotion for business ventures in general - if this "new idea" (ie spamming) was so damn effective, how come this clown is wasting away in relative obscurity, penniless (compared to Amazon's founders, et al, as illustrated above), and banned from practicing his chosen profession?

This moron isn't a revolutionary thinker, or forward thinking business man, as he would love us to believe. He's nothing more than a snake oil salesman, just like the legions of "I'm-gonna-get-rich-quick-off-of-spam" cretins he blazed the trail for.

--
"Oh my God! The dead have risen! And they're voting Republican!" - Bart Simpson

Why didn't the article give his email address? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 05:46 · Score: 0

At least the scumbag was disbarred from practicing law; it's always good to hear of justice being done, even in a minor way.

Clash Course by _Sprocket_ · 2002-03-26 05:48 · Score: 2

From that time to the day of the incident, they found an
independent programmer to create the scripts to do the
mass spamming.

I stumbled on the C&S book at a Barnes and Noble years ago. Flipped through a few pages. Read their story about how they got started. And read their descriptions of the person they managed to find to create the tools needed for their deeds.

They were not kind. In fact, they were almost hostile in their description of the person (and seemed to note his guilt in performing his task). The final mention of the mystery coder is their apparent relief to have the code and be done with his presense. Some gratitude.

It seems these folks were hell-bent on clashing with the tech culture from the very beginning.

Spammers never change ... Remember Joseph Melle? by pgrote · 2002-03-26 06:03 · Score: 2

Joseph Melle proposed to post 1 million AOL email addresses on the net for free for people to use to spam.

http://www.compunotes.com/Interviews/jmelle.htm

I wonder what happened to him?

First? Not likely. by RoboOp · 2002-03-26 06:08 · Score: 1

I'm sure Mr. Canter having failed in every other pursuit would love to be immortalized as the first spammer to justify his worthless existance.

That 'honor' will have to go to "Dave Rhodes", the out-of-luck slacker that moved seedy chain letters onto the internet.
He was posting as early as 91' - and the original was lost to antiquity seeing how it predates deja.

So this will have to do. MAKE MONEY FAST (for dave)

Now the real mystery is who is Dave Rhodes. Nobody ever tracked him down as I recall.

--
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"

Interesting... by cr0sh · 2002-03-26 06:27 · Score: 1

And funny as well. I started my internet experience with Internet Direct in the latter part of 1993 (andrewa@indirect.com), initially with a dial-up shell account (using my Amiga 2000), then later with a SLIP account. I had always wondered about portions of "the incident that started it all"...

Let me close by saying "thank you" to you and your former company for being my "introduction" to the internet. I cannot remember why I chose your company (probably because at the time you were one of only maybe two or three ISPs in Phoenix, and the largest, or something), but it was a great learning experience for me - I will never forget performing my first FTP from a server in .au to your server, then waiting for a long time to download the file from your server to my Amiga over a 2400 baud modem - it was like "magic". Up to that time, all I ever used were local and some long distance BBS's, and occasionally FIDOnet mail.

I ended up keeping my indirect.com address until last year - when Goodnet bought out the consumer customer base from Internet Direct, someone set up and left running a forwarding service (I think his name was Mark or Chris), then when Winstar bought Goodnet, the service continued to work, but the whole thing died when Earthlink bought Winstar, and by that time I was already using cox@home (now cox.net) - I always loved having that "unique" address for so long. But all "good" things must end, so I dropped it...

Not that dropping it was a very bad thing - I had so much SPAM comming into that address (from my early days of posting to coding newsgroups) that dropping it was worth it in the end...

Memories...

--
Reason is the Path to God - Anon

I remeber that day by RatBastard · 2002-03-26 06:27 · Score: 1

I remember the Great Green Card Lottery Day. No one had ever seen anything like it and EVERYONE was hopping-ass mad about it. Everyone. These clowns lost their accounts on their ISP and were soundly chased off the Net.

To those who claim that these guys are not responcible for the deluge of SMAP that chokes our email and has turned Usenet into a mire of watsed bandwidth, I say : "Pull your heads out of your butts and face reality."

I hope this guy rots in the deepest pits of Hell.

--
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.

Re:Ah, memories ... or Canter & Siegel classic by Wanker · 2002-03-26 06:32 · Score: 2

Read the article:

We regret that Sprint is experiencing the same sort of despicable gang war behavior from MIT that was visited on Mr. Boyle. We also know that, in addition, MIT students or personnel are engaged in massive, behind the scenes influence brokering, contacting everyone from access providers to our own employees in an effort to silence us.

Basically the "MIT thugs" were complaining to his ISP about inappropriate use of USENET. When that failed because the spammer found a crooked ISP, they complained to the ISP's ISP about them sanctioning the inappropriate use of USENET.

Since the spammers were under the impression that this was acceptable use of USENET, they objected to the MIT students' attempts at getting them shut down.

Why not link this with micro-payments? by horza · 2002-03-26 06:33 · Score: 2

This is an idea I had a few months ago: each time you send an email to someone you have to pay them 10p (or 1/6$). Hence it becomes expensive to mass-email. Casual spam-merchants will be put out of business. When you receive spam at least you will be automatically recompensed for consuming your time and resources. If two friends or colleagues regularly email each other then they payments cancel each other out and no money is owed. They can be transferable so parents can always dish out e-stamps to their kids to let them email home for free. Write a plug-in for Eudora/Outlook and you can reach nearly all email clients with the new system. Any flaws with this system?

Phillip.

--
Property for sale in Nice, France

Re:Why not link this with micro-payments? by edunbar93 · 2002-03-26 06:52 · Score: 2

Heh. I see flaws in this.

Spammers don't use Eudora, for starters.

And spammers get *lots* of e-mail back. 90% of that mail is automated bounce messages, and the other 10% are death threats. Heck, to make money, the spammers would probably send out tons of invalid mail just so that they can extract the toll from the sender. Spammers as a rule don't use the network legitimately, they exploit the network to its fullest technical extent that they can get away with over the 15 minute period before the ISP roasts their account.

--
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Re:Why not link this with micro-payments? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 08:16 · Score: 0

Congratulations, you just destroyed the linux-kernel mailing list. And spammers won't stop abusing SMTP (wasting all the bandwidth they are now) at least until the vast majority of servers require valid postage, which will never happen (there are still untold thousands of undiscovered open relays out there!) And then there's the inevitable development of postage replay and forging; it should be no surprise that the infrastructure to prevent that costs as much as deploying digital cash, which hasn't happened despite the other problems it would solve.

Laurence Canter's email by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 06:36 · Score: 0

Canter, Laurence
lcanter@dgsystems.com
San Francisco , CA
US

Mr. Wall by mshomphe · 2002-03-26 06:40 · Score: 2

How did you implement sending the spam?
We're talking about the Usenet, not the spam that we see today. It was with a fairly simple script, a Perl script, that just pulled the names of all the newsgroups off a particular server and, just one at a time, sent the message to them through the various Internet protocols that were in wide use at the time.

Goddamn you Larry Wall.

--
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.

Also World's Shortest Spam by RPoet · 2002-03-26 07:04 · Score: 2

From the article: "In [sending the spam], this unknown husband and wife team changed the Internet with one keystroke."

So he managed to write a spam and send it, with one single stroke at the keys? That's so amazing I'm sure one day we'll be able to buy a book about it - on amazon.com, with one single mouse click.

--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.

Clearing up misconceptions by horza · 2002-03-26 07:10 · Score: 2

Spammers don't use Eudora, for starters.

The plug-in would reject mail that did not have a valid e-stamp. Therefore it would not matter what mail client the spammer used.

Heck, to make money, the spammers would probably send out tons of invalid mail just so that they can extract the toll from the sender.

You have to attach the e-stamp to the email you are sending. You don't have to pay for bounce messages.

Spammers as a rule don't use the network legitimately, they exploit the network to its fullest technical extent that they can get away with over the 15 minute period before the ISP roasts their account.

And if you bounced emails that did not have valid e-stamps then you would never receive any of these illegitimate emails.

Phillip.

--
Property for sale in Nice, France

Divorced, bankrupt, disbarred lawyer by pbegley · 2002-03-26 07:29 · Score: 1

He is not a freaking Software developer, he is just another loser looking for another fifteen minutes of fame.

I like to wear my "Spamming the Globe" t-shirt once a season just to make sure it doesn't get moldy in my drawer.

When I read about the Knoller and Noel whose dog murdered the woman in California I thought of Canter and Siegel. I think it should be against the law for two lawyers to marry. Its sort of like cousins getting married without the genetics. Just living together and having sex must lobotomize your moral compass. Anyone have conclusive proof of my theory?

Microsoft to the rescue! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 08:23 · Score: 0

Fortunately, Microsoft has rendered this problem obsolete.

Laurence Canter, Internet Pioneer by Creosote · 2002-03-26 08:24 · Score: 1

Back in '94, Canter and Siegel proclaimed themselves to any media outlet whose attention they could grab that they had bravely opened the Internet for the business uses that rightly belonged to it. By their logic, Edward "Blackbeard" Teach helped open the West Indies to commerce. Canter and Siegel were, and always will remain, pioneers in the sole sense that they were among the first to realize that thuggery on the Internet was both possible and without most of the dangers of real-world theft. They were the original poster children for Garret Hardin's theory of the Tragedy of the Commons as applied to the Net.

In late 1994 I wrote a prophecy about Canter and Siegel as pioneers, and everything Canter said in that interview confirms its accuracy.

Re:You don't have a physical entity which to conta by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-26 08:30 · Score: 0

Sure I could fake a credit card numer (this is illegal though)

you don't say!

Wonderful cost effectiveness... TO HIM by Weasel+Boy · 2002-03-26 08:52 · Score: 1

Cost to send first all-groups Usenet spam: Probably a couple $thousand
Profit: less than $200,000 (according to the spammer)
Value of bandwidth and storage costs for that one spam: Many $thousands at least
Value of bandwidth and storage costs for the angry outbursts it prompted: Many $100,000s
Value of time spent on angry outbursts by outraged Netizens as a result of that one spam: Many $millions
Value of time wasted as a result of all spam by all Netizens since: $billions per year
Cost of destructive effecto on society by scum like him: Incalculable.

Return on Canter's investment: 100-to-1 for him, negative 1,000,000-to-1 or worse for EVERYONE ELSE. Way to go, asshole.

I remember that day very well. "Self," I said, "Today is the day that Usenet became a commercial shit-hole." Happily (for Usenet), some newsgroups nowadays actually do still have a low SNR, probably due to the rise of (unhappily, for everyone) direct email spam.

Kind of offtopic too. by WowTIP · 2002-03-26 10:37 · Score: 1

Please forgive my ignorance if I am wrong in this because I am not that familiar with how mail servers operate, but...

If the cost of hosting and sending those massive amounts of mail is so big, why not amend the email server software? Most people don't need the option of sending a single mail to more than, let's say, 50 to 100 recipients. Why not set a limit? If the mail is adressed to more than 100 recipients, the mail should bounce at the server and no more harm will be caused. That way of getting around spammers would of course need all mail servers to follow the rule of "no more than 100 copies", but if we could force some kind of regulation to go with the making of mail server software?

There would probably be a lot of ways to go around this (scripts, etc.), but anything that makes the art of spamming more difficult is in my book a change for the good.

Most likely I have misunderstood some very basic concept of how email servers work (I am not in the sysadm profession, you know), but if you know better, then tell me why it would not work. No flames please. :)

--

--

"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"

It was inevitable ... but he wasn't the first by B.D.Mills · 2002-03-26 11:31 · Score: 2

He wasn't the first -

In 1987, when I started university, the students at our university were permitted to run a small and simple BBS application that they wrote themselves. This was a couple of years before we got universal Internet access, so it was mostly limited to students of our university. In organisation, it was sort of like newsgroups on Usenet, except inactive areas (called "rooms") would be deleted periodically.

To advertise a forthcoming university event, one second-year student had the bright idea of posting an identical message advertising that event into every room on the board. He must have done it by hand with copy and paste, I never found out exactly how he did it. But one day I found this identical message in each of the more than forty rooms I could visit. It generated a lot of flamage, and earned him a nomination for "most stupid act" at the end-of-year awards from the BBS users' group.

--

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke

Green Card Lottery - Final One? by duct_tape_n_wd40 · 2002-03-26 12:38 · Score: 1

I feel old. Here's some shameless karma whoring for the benefit of those who weren't there at the time...

--
.siggy .siggy .siggy .siggy hoi hoi hoi - Prosit!

Re:Spam Death Penalty. by TheGeneration · 2002-03-26 12:47 · Score: 1

I think there should be a Federal law stating that all users can make account ending in "NoAds" (for example TheGenerationNoAds@hotmail.com) and that spammers cannot send mail to that account. Explicit state that if the e-mail account is based in the United States that any mail sent to that account must follow the law, regardless of orgin. Then have the penalty be Life in prisonment, or the death penalty, depending on the serverity.

Then form a special federal agency that acts as international death troopers. Any country which refuses to turn over a spammer for trial in the US will have covert death troopers invade their soil and kill the spammer.

Simple.

--

The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.

Here's a book excerpt from these morons by MillionthMonkey · 2002-03-26 13:55 · Score: 2

Cut-n-pasted from EFF:

"...some starry eyed individuals who access the Net think of Cyberspace as a community, with rules, regulations and codes of behaviour. Don't you believe it! There is no community. Perhaps there was some truth in that concept in the past, when the Internet was used exclusively by a small, homogeneous group of academics and corporate technical researchers. Today, with Internet access available to everyone, Iway travellers reflect every heterogeneous nuance of the world population. Along your journey, someone may try to tell you that in order to be a good Net "citizen", you must follow the rules of the Cyberspace community. Don't listen. The only laws and rules with which you should concern yourself are those passed by the country, state and city in which you live. The only ethics you should adopt as you pursue wealth on the Iway are those dictated by the religious faith you have chosen to follow and your own good conscience."
- Laurence Canter & Martha Siegel ("the Green Card Lawyers"), from an early review copy of their book, _How_To_Make_a_Fortune_on_the_Information_Superhig hway_, 1994.

There are some reviews of this (out of print) book on Amazon.

Again, no one's being punished by pyramid+termite · 2002-03-26 14:23 · Score: 2

... they're just paying for a service they use heavily. After all, commercial news servers charge for extra gigs downloaded - is that punishment?

You say that a one-cent tax wouldn't stop spam or slow it - perhaps not, but it would pay for it, wouldn't it? Under the current system, nothing's stopping or slowing it and nothing's likely to. At least it would be paid for.

Something like this is the only realistic solution that I can see. Otherwise, the spammers will continue to freeload off the system and all the anti-spam activism in the world won't stop it as if it could have been stopped by these methods, it would have been. We can either redesign the system or resign ourselves to drowning in spam the senders aren't paying for. As for myself, I guess I can live with the status quo; if you can too, than fine. But for those who really want it to change, something like my idea is the only chance.

Just remember - you're already being punished with extra bandwidth used and extra ISP cost for managing spam.

Re:Again, no one's being punished by Karen_Frito · 2002-03-26 14:35 · Score: 2

And again, how do you manage something like this?

It would require a -major- overhaul of the entire internet, because of the concept of Offshore Hosting. -- I host in Tawaii, send my spam from there. Oh, gee, its FREE! Ha, ha, silly American Tax.

Its also unworkable. I send an email to a list -- the LIST goes to 1,000 people -- is that 1 cent for me, 1,000 cents for the list host? Both?

What about auto-replys? Bounceback messages? Reciepts? Emails that don't go anywhere because the addres goes bad? Emails that go overseas? Auto-forwards? My work address forwards to my home address from 6 pm to 7am every day -- one cent or two per email?

I counted today - 312 emails recieved between 8am and 6pm. 109 sent out.

That, right there is $1.09 billed to me. (or in this case, since I counted just emails at work, to my employer). Now, I do this -every- day, 5 days a week -- 5.50.

52 weeks a year -- that's something like 280 dollars per year just for my emails. -- I work for a -small- company, so that's about 10 grand for all of us.

10,000 dollars. It took me an hour to write the filter for my work email that blows away 99.5% of the spam that I get. Took another 3 hours to copy it to everyone else's computers.

That's about 100 dollars worth of my time. (Assuming I make about 25 an hour, which I do.)

I know which one our accountant would go for.

--

http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
Re:Again, no one's being punished by Arrgh · 2002-03-26 21:40 · Score: 1

There is another solution... Invert the Internet mail infrastructure so that email is hosted centrally by senders, and they pay all the inbound bandwidth charges incurred when (if) recipients retrieve the mail.

Dan Bernstein's IM2000 idea is a step in that direction. If everyone used IM2000, normal users would "pay" about the same amount for their outgoing email (unless they were in the habit of spamming their friends with the joke of the week), but spammers would "pay" much more as the flood of retrieval requests came in.

Legitimate bulk mailers would be paying for a more realistic share of the costs of Internet mail infrastructure. ISPs would save money because on the whole, normal users receive more mail than they send.

I've been thinking of implementing it...
Re:Again, no one's being punished by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-27 07:59 · Score: 0

Giving up privacy (what have I read? when? from where?) is completely unacceptable.
Re:Again, no one's being punished by Arrgh · 2002-03-27 13:33 · Score: 1

Fair enough... You'll end up with something analogous to return receipts, where a sender who runs her own IMTP server will know when any particular recipient has elected to download the message.

Many people would use their ISP's mail server though, in which case only their ISP would be able to find out whether recipients had downloaded mail. Or, server software could simply neglect to log the retrieval requests.

As with any alternative to a mainstream system, there are tradeoffs...

waste of good bits by ansak · 2002-03-26 16:44 · Score: 1

This man was not worth Sharael Kolberg's time.
He was not worth c-net's column inches.
And he certainly was of no interest to slashdot readers except as flame-war-fodder.

Really folks, there are so many other important, not to mention interesting things to talk about. Let's allow oblivion to swallow Canter up -- and then all of us will sleep better nights.

--
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...

Canter lives at www.l-ware.com by thephungus · 2002-03-27 06:58 · Score: 1

Was easy to find him via Google. Feel free to drop him a line via voice fax and email about how great you think he is...

Re:Canter lives at www.l-ware.com by meringuoid · 2002-03-29 08:36 · Score: 1

Was easy to find him via Google. Feel free to drop him a line via voice fax and email about how great you think he is... Hey, how about the whois: Administrative Contact: Canter, Laurence larry@thecanters.com Laurence Canter 4035 Alexander Valley Lane Healdsburg, CA 95448 United States (707) 473-9490 Anyone local? Go along and tell him how great he is. Oh, and put that address down on every 'YES! Please rush me my FREE...' form you find. I'm sure he'd appreciate hearing from every entrepreneur around.

--
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.

Senders do, you fucking retard. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-03-27 17:59 · Score: 0

It's called your monthly ISP bill, shit-for-brains.

Then ... by pyramid+termite · 2002-03-29 04:34 · Score: 2

... if it only costs 100 bucks to eliminate 99.5% of the problem, my suggestion would be that the people who are constantly fighting the spam problem just do that, instead of the years-long futile battle they've been fighting. That and blackholing of the worst domains should take care of it.

It's clear that the benefits of the current system outweigh the problems (spam). Thanks for proving my idea wrong in a rational manner.

Re:Then ... by Karen_Frito · 2002-03-29 04:51 · Score: 2

Filtering and some minor updates of filters is - at least so far- the biggest of the problem.

IMO, what needs to be done is more of an education -- Teach the average person how to setup filters, to block spam addresses, to blackhole and killfile on their personal accounts, and in a large amount the problems should be solved.

What doesn't help is that "America's Biggest ISP" has such limited custonization available for email filters (if they allow filtering at all.) that most people just assume that they must delete the spam and put up with it.

(Which reminds me of the client I had who was convinced that everyone in America had to use AoHell, simply because "It's America Online. AMERICA Online. Everyone in America has to use it." -- I wasn't sure if I should laugh or sob.)

--

http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385

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Laurence 'Green Card' Canter Has No Regrets

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