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!
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.
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
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: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.
...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."
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)"?
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.
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!
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.
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.:)
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!
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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)"?
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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
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.
> 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.