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.
It was inevitable
by
CProgrammer98
·
· 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
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?
Oh HE started it....
by
secondsun
·
· 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Find them and destroy them
by
skroz
·
· 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 $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"
Hopefully all of this will come with a white hot poker in his ass.
-- --
Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Re:Find them and destroy them
by
Bowfinger
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ 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)"?
What really makes me angry...
by
AltGrendel
·
· 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
Zeinfeld
·
· 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/
Playing fast and loose with history ...
by
jc42
·
· 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
khendron
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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.
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?
I wonder if he gets angry
by
qurob
·
· 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
·
· 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
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· Score: 2
Re:Is it any suprise that he has no regrets?
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· 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.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question...
by
Indras
·
· 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.
This just in!!!
by
nochops
·
· 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
nochops
·
· 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
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
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.
"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: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.
should charge one cent per email
by
peter303
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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
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· 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
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· 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?
Re:should charge one cent per email
by
bero-rh
·
· 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
Re:Spamming is a right
by
Peyna
·
· 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: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.
Must control fist of death...
by
martin
·
· 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).
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?
...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.
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.
Re:Spammer reminisces
by
B1
·
· 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.
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?
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.
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)...
Moral justification
by
briggsb
·
· 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."
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:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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.
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...)
> 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.
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"
I despise spam, too, but...
by
mlas
·
· 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
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"?
Old lesson... do unto others... applies here.
by
sdo1
·
· 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
·
· 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
RPoet
·
· 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
bentini
·
· Score: 2
Are your parents Immanuel Kant and his theory of the moral imperative?
"To most people, Compuserve *did* come before the Internet"
Quack quack quack.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox
by
JabberWokky
·
· 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
Proof that Perl is Evil
by
wiredog
·
· 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!
Thinking backwards?
by
marnanel
·
· 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>
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"...
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?
> 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:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox
by
dattaway
·
· 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.
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
-- Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
Spam on Usenet is controllable
by
Colin+Smith
·
· 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
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:Former Internet Direct owner's comment..
by
ryantate
·
· 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.
Nothing wrong with paying for something used
by
pyramid+termite
·
· 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
·
· 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.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question...
by
DrXym
·
· 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.
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
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox
by
frankie
·
· 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:
1988: my first LAN download (10Mbps ether) instead of a 2400 modem.
1994: Green Card Lottery
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.
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?"
Hitler was in WWI. I don't see why he wouldn't have killed anybody.
-- Karma: Non-Heinous
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox
by
frankie
·
· 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).
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.
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.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question...
by
Steve+B
·
· 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.
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.
Next interview: Dave Rhodes
by
Sloppy
·
· 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.
Re:Ah, memories ... or Canter & Siegel classic
by
SweenyTod
·
· Score: 2
I don't know the story.
What exactly did you do to him?
--
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
Must be the devil himself.
by
Webmoth
·
· 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.
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
·
· 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?
Re:Ah, memories ... or Canter & Siegel classic
by
Wanker
·
· 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
·
· 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?
Re:Why not link this with micro-payments?
by
edunbar93
·
· 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question...
by
DrXym
·
· 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.
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/
It was inevitable ... but he wasn't the first
by
B.D.Mills
·
· 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
Here's a book excerpt from these morons
by
MillionthMonkey
·
· Score: 2
"...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
·
· 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
·
· 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.)
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox
by
JabberWokky
·
· 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
... 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.
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.)
Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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!
I guess there's justice in the world after all
Pokéthulhu
Gotta catch you all!
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
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.
...is his smug attitude about the whole thing.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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.
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?
When he comes to work at 8:00 am and has 30 pieces of spam in his mailbox....
After all, he is a lawyer so scummy, that other lawyers disbarred him.
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.
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.
a nd-earn-some-money assholes is responsible for this.
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-
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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
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
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/
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.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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"
...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
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?
"To most people, Compuserve *did* come before the Internet"
Quack quack quack.
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
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
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
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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!
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?
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!
From the article:
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I think we have a deal...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
There are 3 internet-related moments I will always remember:
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.
Both slash and scoop are written in perl.
Best Slashdot Co
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?"
Hitler was in WWI. I don't see why he wouldn't have killed anybody.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Usenet is definitely an Opt-in environment
.newsrc
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
Back in the days of netiquette, this was something you simply DID NOT DO (except for the occasional AFJ).
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know the story.
What exactly did you do to him?
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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/
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
Cut-n-pasted from EFF:
g hway_, 1994.
"...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_Superhi
There are some reviews of this (out of print) book on Amazon.
... 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.
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
... 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.