Posted by
michael
on from the father-of-the-modern-spam-has-a-nice-ring-to-it dept.
madmagic writes "News.com has an
interview today with the surviving lawyer who spammed Usenet with multiple "Green Card Lottery" posts in '94." And today we can get spam in 20 different languages. Hurray.
Re:Normally...
by
reynaert
·
· 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:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox
by
blancolioni
·
· 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.
Former Internet Direct owner's comment..
by
cowmix
·
· 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:This just in!!!
by
Erasmus+Darwin
·
· 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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
> 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.
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.