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.
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!
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)"?
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: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
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.
Re:Normally...
by
reynaert
·
· Score: 5, Informative
as I use a Unix based mail client, I cannot block addresses.
On Unix, filtering mail is normally done by Procmail, not by your mail client. See
this excellent tutorial.
Re: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).
...Stop harping on the guy. If it wasnt for him, I'ld still be bald, my wang wouldnt be 20-30% bigger, my vast real-estate empire would be nothing, and my hot willing wife from asia would still be over there picking rice...
God bless the spam...it changed my life
--
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Re: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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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: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"...
A lawyer AND a spammer. He's got two strikes. On more and he's out.
-- Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Re: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.
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: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).
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: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/
Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
...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?
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!
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.
> 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.
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).
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
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/