Slashdot Mirror
Celebrating Spam's Ten-Year Anniversary
khalua writes "Netcraft has a story that 10 years ago today, the first widely recognized spam was sent by... oh the irony...a law firm. Hate to see what a beast it grows into when it's 20." Reader prostoalex writes "Ever wonder why spam is so prevalent and who buys all those revolutionary products sold at unbelievable prices? Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail. The average buy was $155, which exceeds the average of $114 that opt-in e-mail generated. It's worth noting that US e-commerce sales in general generated $50 billion total last year, however, the data was presented by a different researcher."
Come on... that Canter & Siegel green-card-lottery spam-scam wasn't the first spam by a long-shot... maybe the first spam to get written up the print media. Usenet was already littered with off-topic commercial posts and crossposted garbage by then, and unsolicited e-mailings (on a much smaller scale than today) were hardly unheard-of.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'll tell you who buys this stuff:
I had an aquaintence who surfing the web while we were in the library one time and freaked out all of a sudden. She went up to ask the librarian if she wouldn't be able to get her "prize" she just "won" because she was in a library and the "web people" wouldn't know where to find her...
That is who buys this stuff.
Netcraft confirm that spam is dying?
Ever heard the phrase "follow the money"? Yes? Well, that's what they should be doing with Spam.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
We must thank our overlords for blessing us with ten years of free sex, bigger penises, and making money at home! I mean where would we be without them? I for one continue to welcome our spam overlords' 2300 messages a day!
...that people actually buy the stuff in spam... What kind of idiot would--HEY! look! Cheap Viagra! woohoo!!! what luck!
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
...of making my mortage three to four inches larger while working at home for a Nigerian with financial problems who gets paid to take surverys online for a company that would like to pre-apporve me for a no-hassle Platinum card that I can use to pay for tuition at "a major university."
Ok, I'm done now...
The real litigious bastards...
As long as Spam continues to be profitable (and apparently increasingly so), I fear we may never really see the end of it. Even if SMTP protocols are revised, even if Internet postage is applied to emails, as long as you're doing better revenues over your expenses, which in most cases you are, then there is no hope.
Tho I may sound resigned and defeated to e-mail's evenutal fate, there are alternates. Instant messaging is easier controlled (I never get any Spam, but then I don't allow people on my buddy list to IM me). IRC and other online chats are tough to pollute as well.
In short my prediction is in 10 years I will have completely ditched my email address and I will be giving friends my ICQ UIN/AOL Handle/Yahoo Handle in lieu of it.
Ok I'm through ranting, time for everyone else to.
...in bed
Show me 11 billion from spam and I'll show you a guy with a 4 foot long penis.
that if that many people are buying items pitched to them in unsolicited e-mails, then it's not really 'unwanted' is it? If no one was buying this junk then I would understand the call to ban it outright but as it stands, we just need to figure out how to keep it away from the people who don't want these e-mails. A free market and free speech go hand in hand and soliciting through e-mail is one example of that. I'm not prepared to take food out of someone's mouth without a good reason. Here's an article where Gates advocates paying for each e-mail. Seems like a good solution to me.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
You know you're no longer a snotty nosed geek when you can remember Canter & Siegel. Back in the days when you said "the internet" most people thought "Usenet", not "the Web." I think I still have an old O'Reiley book Using the Internet or some such thing were mention of the "World Wide Web" was relegated to an Appendix.
The first spam was sent May 3, 1978 -- 25 years ago . (It was written May 1 but sent on May 3.) The end of the month marks the 11th anniversary of when the first time a USENET posting got named a spam. Once again, Slashdot editors need to start checking the validity of their article before posting.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
"The 23rd Spam" by Sam the Psalmist,Toronto, Ontario
(real name withheld by request)
The 23rd Spam
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside the still waters,
He restoreth my credit and consolidateth my debts,
For as little as $1,750,
If I act now.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me,
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
And can now be 50 Percent Larger in Three Weeks.
Guaranteed.
Thou preparest a table before me
In the presence of mine enemies,
Thou annointest my head with oil,
My cup runneth over.
But as an added bonus,
I will receive $1,000.00 cash,
If I complete thy online registration form today.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me,
All the days of my life,
And I will dwell forever,
In the House of the Lord,
Which I shall refinanceth,
To take advantage,
Of the lowest mortgage rates in years.
You probably shouldn't click this.
There is no way that we should ever "celebrate" spam ... Maybe we can celebrate the eradication of spam, but never the anniversary.
On my Yahoo! mail account I set up a filter that sends anything with "unsubscribe" to the trash automatically. My spam went WAY down. :)
There was some mass message board postings to the effect that my IP address was being broadcast to world despite the fact we were all on direct dialup and trumpet Winsock had not yet been developed.
Crikey, thats a lot of penis enlargement pills.
I feel quite inadequate now.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
By now, small naughty bits and "performance problems" should be a thing of the past.
Mourning Spam's Ten Year Anniversary
Ten Years of Spam Adversity
Ten Years of the most villainous scum (outside of Mos Eisley) crawling out of the woodwork
Ten Years of some putz trying to get $25,000,000 out of a bank account somewhere in the world
Ten Years of geeks valiantly slugging it out on the front lines of the conflict while Washington dithers
Ten Years abusing free speech in another vein
Ten Years watching a valuable resource be clogged by the low rung of the evolutionary ladder
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
this quote
"Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail."
makes me wonder how many billions were spent on wasted hours deleting the garbage, & how many billions have been wasted on network arcitechture to carry the load.
what about Fidonet, or whatever that mail system was that linked BBS's back in the day? I bet spam was sent through that, if nothing more that innapropriate advertisements for other BBS's. disclaimer: i never used fidonet, so this is all just speculation.
No, I think Data was just one android (though, with androids you never know for sure) :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
While irritating as hell to many, the sad truth is that spam works. And I know this from first-hand experience (Don't you love AC's!?).
You know all those viagra ads you get? Well chances are it's not from us (I've never met someone who's gotten one of our spams), but maybe you have. In any case, we have margins 100% - 200% higher for people who buy via bulk mail than via other advertising methods, and sales are pretty darn good. I would imagine this isn't too surprising considering the kind of people who would actually respond to spam aren't that wise. In any case, as much as it is hated, it is effective. If it wasn't effective it wouldn't happen.
s/1995/1994/
But Usenet was still useable in 1995. It wasn't until later that it degenerated to the state it's in today.
--
E_NOSIG
Apparently we've been trying to stop spam by targeting the wrong people. It seems to me that if we want to stop spam, we need to remove, inhibit or embarrass the people who actually BUY their products as a result of the spam they receive...
now go ahead and mod me flaimbait or troll you useless dickweeds!
[on the tag of a birthday present to spam]:
l address.com
To: Spam
From: Everyone
[spam opens package] thousands of spring-loaded snakes carrying advertisements for penis enlargers, viagra, and various pointless gidgets flys out.
Bottom of package reads:
To be removed from this list, email: okstopspammingmeseriously@yeahrightlikethisisarea
Happy birthday spam!
Happy birthday spam!
Steal This Sig
I immediately thought that the topic was refering to the average grocery store shelf-life of a can of spam.
why are we celebrating SPAM? So our marketers can get richer about stalking/annoying us?
austintsmith.com
Back in the halcyon days of grad school, this...this...ad! shows up in a newsgroup I favored. I dashed off an e-mail them (several, in fact) including many full copies of their post. I encouraged my fellow students to do the same.
We were quite happy to learn later the flood of mail took down their server. Yes, there I was riding the crest of the spam fighting movement without even knowing it. And at the time it was just a break from Netrek and posting via anon.penet.fi...
This message has no point. Just some memories of an old guy. Did I ever tell you about programming the Commodore PETs in the math department in high school? It was like this...
Or how about a ton of salt.
What's that? The *Direct Marketing Association* released a report saying that spam sales accounted for $11.7 billion?
But wait, isn't the DMA the very organization that represents the interests of the spam houses?
Gee, I wonder if they would have an interest in convincing people [particularly retailers] that spam is a successful form of advertising?
And what's that you say? The $11.7 billion estimate is based on calls to 1000 consumers? I wonder how they decided which 1000 people to call? I'll give you a hint...I bet they didn't opt in.
Instant messaging is easier controlled (I never get any Spam, but then I don't allow people on my buddy list to IM me).
Don't let people communicate with you at all. Set your filters to reject all e-mail, and you'll get 100% spam blockage!
(I know, that was a typo, but I couldn't resist!)
Got Apathy?
that AOL connected up to USENET? I personally thought that was the death of decent newsgroups.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Since SPAM has propogated on to email, I am reminded of my favorite lines out of the Unix Haters Handbook.
The interesting thing is that all this was published before the C&S Usenet spamming. How much time are admins spending on email management now?
SPAM has killed Usenet's usefullness for me. At least filters like Popfile and such are keeping SPAM over email bearable; even if they are not fixing the problem.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
The wisdom of the bard proves true once again, and once again it was ignored, to be specific, "first thing - kill the lawyers".
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.
If one person answered all of these penis lengthening ads and purchased the product, the resulting member would stretch to the moon, circle it 3 times, and reach all the way back.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This is older than 10 years, but Tim Bray tells a funny story about how he might have brought down AOL back in 1988 in response to getting a spam email from someone with the email address lipstick@aol.com.
He launched a job to send an angry response email every 10 seconds. He forgot about it until he heard a couple of guys talking a few days later about how their aol accounts were down over the weekend.
Check it out, it's pretty hilarious.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
I submitted a story about a year ago that said SPAM was 20 years old according to the BBC, (going by USENET spam) But I could have swore the anniversary of spam story has been here several times.
Is it? I wouldn't know.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I doubt those numbers include the refunds that are given either because the product does not work. But there are some people who make the purchase for the sole purpose of tracking down the spammer and filing a lawsuit.
Fight Spammers!
Everyone on my contact list and in my address book is going to hear about this monumental anniversary! And hopefully they will all forward it to everyone they know!
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail
So how hard can it be to find exactly the companies that sold this stuff?
These are ultimately the companies that are responsible for spam. Why don't we hold them liable? I think I can proof that spam is costing me a significant amount of money (mostly lost time) even though I do have a fairly good working filter.
I hear all the time that we can't really get the spammers because they are in China, or recently because they use zombies/compromised boxes all over the internet. Well, at the end of the day, it's not the spamhouses that are responsible for this. If no-one paid them to spam, it wouldn't be a business.
So someone is paying money to get this spam to you. How come we can't go after them and make them pay?!
It will be taking your keys when its twenty!
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
Why not celebrate the birthday by picking a spam site and all visiting it to say Happy Birthday?
If we did this once a day with a new site each day...and, of course, NO ONE buys anything, their click through rate would plummet, possibly their server as well.
And it cannot be illegal: they WANT us to go to their site.
Here's my suggestion
www.ffdsd4d.com or 219.153.1.215.
Here's part of the email that delivered this:
envy of the other members of the gym GET UP TO 3 MONTHS
SUPPLY FREE !
I remember when I first heard of the World Wide Web, back in '92. I thought "Why do you need a gui interface? Gopher and FTP work just fine."
As you can tell, I am no techo-revolutionary.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Technology will improve. Filtering will work as long as it is "intelligent". Mail systems will improve. Not too long before mail routing will toss out any message without correct verifiable origins. The returns to spammers will dwindle to almost nothing.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
11.7 Billion?!
Oh man, the dark side is calling me. It's whispering in the back of my mind "Go ahead and just send out millions of emails a day and rake in millions of dollars. So what if you are hated by almost every living person on the planet....11.7 billion!"
Then I smack myself and remember the most important lesson my dad ever taught me "never degrade yourself for money, only for personal enjoyment".
They are never going to be able to stop these guys now. With that kind of money they can buy all the influence they need to keep pumping this crap out until the system becomes so overloaded that people stop using email altogether.
Kill all the idiots who buy these products. No market for penis pills, no spam to push them. Supply and demand. Simple.
The black market revenues for hard drugs is in the billions as well, yet no one praises its economic benefits outside of criminal circles.
It was religous spam sent out from a DEC employee. Believing otherwise is a simple way of identifying the newbies.
C&S may get publicity as the first PITA (of many to come) but they were not the first spammers.
From a survey of 1000 respondants... $32.5 billion on solicited and unsolicited combined.
What's the U.S. population these days?
250,000,000?
$130 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.?
How much per household with a computer and an internet connection?
By email?
Based on a survey?
Of people who responded?
Of people who knew what email was?
Of people who knew what it meant to respond to an email?
Of people who knew the difference between a solicited and an unsolicited email?
Sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association?
I call BS.
Oddly enough, hormel's spam first appeared on store shelves on March 5, 1937. Heard on the radio this am...
uhhhm? With that level of ability to absorb info (or that IQ), why did she bother going to a libtary?
[this sig has been trunca
That was my 1st impression when I 1st saw the title. It seems to me that some people just don't have any sense. We should never celebrate anything bad.
testing out my trending skills
If you do some digging at Brad Templeton's Home Page, his History of Spam has a different version of the history. DEC may have not been the first!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
How many penis enlargements does that equate to?
Or could it be that people that are not web-saavy have a small penis that they can't get up because they're worried about their mortgage or that poor guy in Nigeria that can't get his money out?
Maybe there's an obvious correlation here that we just don't see because we are web-saavy.
myke (aka "The Tripod")
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
My favorite quote from his reply supporting spam:
4) Would a dating service for people on the net be "frowned upon" by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
Yes mister Stallman. There are now many dating services for people on the net. I'm sure you've gotten plenty of unsolicited mail about them by now.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
What's the current preferred, effective, easy-to-deal-with spam filter for a generic WinXP/Outlook user?
SpamKiller is getting on my nerves with false positives, false negatives, un-rescuable attachments, lame support, etc.
SpamBayes? SpamAssassin? Help! Is there a good poll or thread? Cnet is useless. Thank you for the tips, and thank you for not flaming or making lame-ass cluster/get laid jokes. I'm just a regular busy gal, sick of spam, needing to get my work done, looking for relief.
Yeah, if you define "Opt in" as forgetting to uncheck a tiny checkbox in an isolated region of the page.
Oh yeah, and that checkbox gets reset to "On" if anything's wrong with the form the first go round. That's my favorite part.
- The DMA recommends junk mail
- Anti-virus companies warn about the threat of viruses
- FSF recommends Free Software
- Slashdot user promotes Linux
I know, I know. Offtopic. Lighten up though, it's SPAM!!
Sheesh how hard does someone have to look! This crap was all over usenet
...."
"Dear Friend,
My name is Dave Rhodes. In September 1988 my car was
reposessed and the bill collectors were hounding me like you
wouldn't believe. I was laid off and my unemployment checks
had run out.
I like the quote: "estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail" coming from people who want you to by their unsolicited e-mail services. Does anyone really trust this number, or does it seem totally made up?
And if you believe that number I have a new marketing technique for you called 'Silent Marketing'. Just pay me a few thousand dollars and your product will be available to millions of potential buyers! Billions of dollars were spent over the web this year, so obviously my marketing idea will generate billions of dollars for you! Never mind what the idea is, other people are making money so if you give me money, you'll be making money too!
I've heard that there was a web site that showed many photos of abortion doctors. I don't understand why people don't create a web site that shows us what these spammers look like. They definitely deserve to be shot.
All the web masters would have to do is show a couple head shots [front & profile], as well as a few shots of them in casual situations [so that we can recognize them in regular clothing, & being relaxed, etc]. The site wouldn't have to advocate anything. The web surfers can make up their own minds.
It would be as if the web masters are painting targets on the heads on these spammers. If anybody calls these web masters to the carpet for "painting targets on them", then they would only have to say, "What? I'm just painting. I just like to paint.".
testing out my trending skills
So, that's how much a penis enlarger costs.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I have a good idea on how to celibrate.
.com &foo=7 to http://www.example.com/harvest.pl?abuse@localhost& foo=9 or somesuch)
First, go to your inbox and find a spam (don't worry, if you don't see one now, wait for five minutes or so... or just redirect a few from your spam filters to a holding area).
Next, read the email headers (make sure you have the FULL headers! change your client's mode to "advanced" if need be). If you cannot, at least post it to net.admin.net-abuse.sightings with the subject [EMAIL] for others to track. Or read net.admin.net-abuse.email and other sites to learn how to track the spam.
Now, read the spam with all the headers carefully. First, try to look for the originating computer. Watch those timestamps, too! Sometimes spam will pretend to have come from somewhere else before the actual spammer's computer! See if you can find the proper ISP to complain to.
Now, look for URLs, phone numbers and contact information. They want you to buy something, right? How would you got about doing that? Be sure to slightly munge any URLs when you visit them (especially if looking at a "remove me" link...) Simply change the data fed to the CGI scripts (e.g. change http://www.example.com/harvest.pl?email=me@example
Use this and Google to see if you can get names, addresses & phone numbers for the spammer. Post this to net.admin.net-abuse.email to help others track the same folks, later. This can also be helpful to find this information if others have already tracked the person who spammed you.
Next, file a trouble ticket with the ISP(s) affected. Usually, they have an abuse@example.com type email to report this stuff to. Read their Terms of Service and quote them if need be. Give them a full copy of the spam, along with the output of traceroute/dig/nslookup as necessary.
Ideally, in the end, you'll be able to compile dossiers of net abusers for future reference. Then, you will know where to file complaints when required (e.g. should you ever want to sue the person in question). Here's a simple, handy example of the kind of information you can easily find on people:
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042 USA
801-765-4999 phone
801-765-1313 fax
Contact SCO online
http://www.thescogroup.com/company/feedbac k/index. html
Darl C McBride
1799 Vintage Oak Ln
Salt Lake City, UT 84121-6539
Darl's home phone #: (801)424-2006
Darl's office phone #: 801-932-5820
Email Darl: darl@sco.com
(Note that, to the best of my knowledge, neither SCO nor any of its executives has ever spamed anyone. The above information was just conveniently available via some AC post, and it represents approximately what information I would gather concerning spammers, i.e. both their corporate and personal information)
The point of this, of course, is not to harass the spammers. It is simply to point out that you know who is doing these things, you can inform them of that (preferably while staying anonymous), and if they do anything to break the law (or their ISP's ToS, etc.), that you know where to find them.
The inequity between you being anonymous and them not being anonymous can thus be used as leverage to correct errant behavior on their part, since you can report them to lawful authorities if you note any wrongdoing on their part.
Part of why spam is the problem it is is because it is so impersonal, in some respects. They feel comfortably insulated by their anonymity, thus they feel that they have the right to spam with impunity. By piercing their anonymity, you can make them uncomfortable about what they are doing (hopefully triggering their concience, should any part thereof remain) and hopefully work in a legal manner to correct their errant behavior.
Note that it does not always work. For example, while he is not a spammer, Darl has mentioned that his
This report is mistaken. The first large-scale spamming of Usenet preceeded this one by nearly two months. I remember it well, as I used Usenet pretty heavily at the time.
It wasn't lawyers hawking green cards who really got the ball rolling. It was a religious nut warning us all about the end of the world. On January 17, 1994, Clarence L. Thomas IV (not the Supreme Court guy) spammed all known Usenet groups with a message titled Global Alert For All: Jesus is Coming Soon .
You can see the original message in Google's archives. And you can read about some of the after-effects in RISKS 15.49, from February 1994.
Canter & Siegel, the green card spammers, certainly earned their awful reputation. But they were only ripping off someone else's idea.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
I'll only believe it works when you show me a man with a 3 foot penis with diplomas from Harvard and MIT and with several Platinum cards for all the cash that Nigerian billionaires he didn't know left him when they died.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
He seems to have had trouble grasping the nature of SPAM before he saw it personally.
DNA just wants to be free...
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0902841.html
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005055.html
Projecting 2004 to have 70% of all households with Internet connectivity (doubtful), there are about 70 million Internet connected households in the U.S... let's assume 100% of them read their email (I barely read my email with all the SPAM in it)
I don't know anyone who purchased anything via bulk email... or bulk mail for that matter (except taxis, and ordering fast food...), but it seems that the average person with Internet connectivity in the U.S. is buying about $430 worth of stuff... by email!
To add to this they indicate that the email must be non-fraudulant to count... I can't remember the last potentially non-fraudulent bulk unsolicited email I've seen.
I'd like to see the mean instead of the average. That is, I'd like to see how evenly that $155 per purchase is distributed amongst those that make purchases via spam.
I'd be willing to guess that they included all the scams (such as those of Nigerian type) into those figures, and the actual reality is quite different than reported.
Not only that, but what about the 'average made per impression'? Seems pretty ineffective. Seems like you'd piss people off more than anything.
Of course, there's nothing like an objective study, now is there?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
testing out my trending skills
This story is a little old, but back in 1994, Siegel was interviewed by K. K. Campbell. She's just a little out there. You can read the interview here
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
I bought the teeshirt "Spamming The Globe" I think there were only a few hundred (if that) made. I wonder if I have a collectors item?
And perhaps you already know this, but the Nigerian scam is named the "419 scam" after the corresponding table in the Nigerian Criminal Code Act. For the lazy among you:
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
I still say we should spam those companies who advertise services via E-Mail.
An Anonymous Coward spammer talking about sales being "pretty darn good."
Now was it about spammers... Oh yeah, now I remmeber it was the rules of spam and rule #1, Spammers Lie.
Gee, if this is true, that means that spammers are posting to slashdot. I wouldn't be surprised if they are astroturfing all the spam stories, with the intent to protect their "business" intrests. That would explain a lot of the comments and their scores (spammers shouldn't have harsh jail punishments, blocklists are evil, just hit delete, have filters hide the fact that you still are getting and downloading their crap, etc).
I was with the ISP that was involved at the time. The poor company, based in Phoenix AZ, was inundated with complaints and my email service was shut down multiple times due to the ISP's server overload. The ISP tried to shut down the email account from the "gifted" legal duo that sent the spam but were immediately threatened by the company with legal action. We all received new TOS's within a week.
I'm so happy about this that I'm going to send an e-mail about the event to 43,000,000 of my closest friends.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
... to send the law offices of Canter and Siegel about 5 million unsolicited emails. Who's with me?
-j
Anybody can own a car, even a blind person or someone with Down's Syndrome. But you can only drive it on your own property--once you start driving it on somebody else's (like the government's) property, you're going to need permission (a government license) from that somebody else.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Apparently an Americanism; "data was" is the usual term here on the left side of the pond. "Data were" just sounds painful on the ears.
I had a SPARC IPX on my desk when I received the Canter and Siegal email. I immediately generated a core dump and set a cron job to mail it to them every 10 minutes. I wish that were still possible.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Ah, yes, I remember it well. It wasn't the first - I mean, Make Money Fast had been around for years, but that was the first to spam all Usenet.
Back then, that was dangerous. Within 24 hrs, as I recall, there were posts of the real estate records of the house they owned and lived in, and the one or two that they owned and rented out...and shortly after, the text of his disbarrment for failure to file motions in time, and on, and on.
Last I heard, they were divorced.
mark
From: nike@indirect.com (Laurence Canter)j ect: Green Card Lottery- Final One?s t: id1.indirect.com
Newsgroups: alt.brother-jed,alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst
Sub
Date: 12 Apr 1994 07:40:42 GMT
Organization: Canter & Siegel
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <2odj9q$25q@herald.indirect.com>
NNTP-Posting-Ho
Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.
The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a
permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.
PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.
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According to the copy I have (I saved it, I knew it was special), it was April 12 that Canter & Siegel sent their green card scam. If you don'T beleive my copy, just do google on canter & Siegel, and read it there. I don't know where this March 5 date comes from.
Man from Nantucket
Bought internet penis pills
He can't hear you now.
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The average buy was $155, which exceeds the average of $114 that opt-in e-mail generated.
What matters is not the average amount spent per transaction, but the average amount spent per email.
I still have the green card larywers t-shirt that someone from news.admin was selling. Ahh, the good old days...
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
How many spamers are celebrating the 10th anniversary in a tribunal or jail?
Isn't today also the day that SARS came to North America? Why don't we celebrate that? Celebrating the anniversary of spam makes about as much sense.
I propose to honor the occasion by inviting the world's most prominent spammers to an honorary banquet. Awards offered in several categories, including Volume, Most Creative Filter Avoidance, and Clever misspellings of the word "penis". Large cash prizes, of course.
Then we carpet bomb the hell out of the place.
---- Just another spud server.
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.
I say we go back to the days of stocks, pillories and public humiliation in an effort to stop spam. You get caught buying something via spam, you get hauled to the city square, shackeled to a post, and the rest of us get to throw rotten tomatoes at you. For example, buy Cialis and you get to spend your "special weekend" in the stocks.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
It seems to me this "survey" could be used by spam marketers to sell their services to potential clients. Something's fishy about this one.
Celebrating spam?... For some reason I get the feeling young babies are being sacrificed today.
The late, unlamented CyberPromo [Sanford Wallace] was a nusance back about 1991 or so, when all I has was a Compu$erve account.
...]
Adding insult to injury, CI$ imposed a $0.75 charge for each message originating in a non CI$ email system [internet, GEnie, Prodigy
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
does that mean that organized crime should be considered an economic boon?
Capitalism relies on people having choices on where to spend their money. In that, spammers are like other businesses - you don't have to buy from who they represent, and if you choose to you get what you deserve, What is bad about spam is that it spends the money of others without their consent. Direct mail, TV, and raido ads all are paid for by the users and listened to by people who chose to be there for the most part. Spammers lie (rule #1), cheat and steal to use bandwidth they don't pay for to spread their word. The people who own those computers, the admins trying to debug them, etc. all pay the costs for the spam. If they weren't busy trying to prevent the unauthorized use of their computers, they could do something useful (and which they choose) with their money and that of their investors rather than either give it to spammers or admins.
Money taken from others may enter the economy, but since it was gotten at no cost (the spammers didn't pay for bandwidth, but only got money for their spam) they likely see it as less valuable; their ill-gotten money thus drives up the costs of the tings they buy for others.
Spammers take resources and money from others. This devalues both the choice that underpins capitalism and the valuation of goods. Moving money around is not a good end in and of itself. (Can you say "tech bubble", or "Great Depression"?)
But I heard on the radio heading to work today that Microsoft wants to put some sort of simple logic (math or copying a string of chars) problem that you have to solve before sending an email. Besides Microsoft being behind it (Patents are pending I'm sure :(), it actually sounds like a decent idea.
Back in 1992, there was no GUI for the web (Mosaic came out in late 1993), so you'd have to be using Lynx, or something similar if there was such a beast, as I did way back then. I don't think many people realized the potential, even after Mosaic, though, because there was so little content at the time, and most of it was really bad (I can't say I was an exception, but at least I had a page, not something marked under construction). Mosaic's idea was to make a graphical based html viewer, which happened to have been heavily influenced by Gopher (the GUI versions of Gopher, at least). Honestly, I though Lynx was an unwieldy piece of crap and html wasn't worth the effort as it would be dead in a couple of years... real forward thinking :)
:)
After creating my first web page (early 1994, but it wasn't done until March) I pretty much abandoned the web until I was offered extra disk space just before Netscape 1.0 (2MB initially, then 10MB, which was a kingdom of stash space since our UNIX drive quota was only 2MB). I was quickly driven to learn html so I could create a page and they wouldn't have an excuse to take my stash away... I was a disk space addict
If you trust anything the DMA tells you, then you are a fool.
The first paragraph:
Despite consumer complaints about unsolicited commercial e-mail, the Direct Marketing Association yesterday released a study showing U.S. consumers spent $11.7 billion on products and services advertised in unsolicited messages.
Notice they didn't tie the correlation off.
advertised in unsolicited emails
Not: "because they followed a link in an unsolicited email"
Big difference there. Viagra is "advertised" in email. Viagra is also obtained by perscription by doctors for legit medical reasons. The way they worded that makes it sound like they counted normal Viagra perscriptions in that 11 billion dollars. Even if the patient did not in fact follow a link from a spam email but just went to the doctor to help with the "get woody" problem.
I am not sure why they would word it that way, but it makes me suspicious of the motives of the person that wrote the article... like they want to be convincing that spam is a good way to advertise and does actually cause sales. (Which I only half believe.)
That's the main point - "Spam" implies multiple reproduction (a crossposted article only has to be transferred once), and very wide dispersal.
Keeping the latter in mind, the anniversary of the C&S Green Card Lottery post should really be April 12-14th (the script ran for nearly three days). The March postings were on a much smaller scale, and mostly to groups outside North America (those with a toplevel country code, like fr.*).
There's an interesting 1994 interview with loony paranoiac Martha Siegel here.
Where are they now, I wonder? Institutionalised? Jailed? I somehow doubt they're Rich, even though they fully deserve to be by 2004 economic standards.
Here's a picture of the Canter and Seigel shirt made by Joel somebody-or-other to commemorate them.
e
http://geekt.org/geekt/morenews.cgi?who=bluedov
I was a Senior in college, and a fellow student was writing a paper on this new WWW thing, so I got to hear about the speculation of what it could become. You are right, there wasn't a GUI yet, I was just scoffing at the absurd notion of such a thing.
Then I got to my first job in late '93 at Motorola, and they were running Unix workstations. Got Mosaic installed when it came out, and another guy and I figured out how to get out to the internet. Talk about exciting! Being able to surf the web while everyone else not only didn't have access, but didn't really know what it was. It was pretty tough in those days, there weren't even any search engines yet. I helped set up our intranet website, and had to give a few presentations (to seasoned professionals) on how it could benefit us. I actually got an award for being a founding member of our department's web team. It is really funny looking back those times. I can't wait to see how different things become in the next 10+ years.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Birth ... ... ...
Grow
Mature
Dead! NO???
Oh ... i wish it could be dead sooner.
Come to think about it, spam has more than nine lives.
It is immortal!
-- br
IBM published a book, "Accessing the Internet", in August 1995. About 230 pages long. Very quaint in parts ("150,000 new users every month") but still has many (at this point) timeless truths about working with the internet.
Find it at this IBM search site or get the PDF file here.
Not only is my dick really huge now, but thanks to the Miracle Cream spam I answered, my tits have increased 3 cup sizes!
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.
In other news, the American Society for the Sales of Alternative Medicine estimated that new age hippies saved $47.3 trillion by forgoing medical insurance and waving crystals around insead.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
That 11.7 billion wouldn't have disappeared if there was no spam. It could have been spent elsewhere, thus generating similar or greater economic benefits and not imposing parasitic costs to the rest of us in dealing with the spammers' crap. If it was not spent, and was kept in people's pockets, that would probably be a good thing for the American economy as well, considering the ridiculous level of US consumer debt...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Of course if you don't like spam, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it. Then again, if you REALLY hate it...this is interesting... Fight Spam
Netiquette guidelines are not, as the article says, unspoken.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt
http://www.narnarnar.com
Not so widely recognised, maybe, it advertised the DEC-20 computers to the entire ARPANET in 1978. And of course there's the "THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE, PEACE IS THE WAY" of 1971...
I keep running into people who have been doing web design since before Mosaic came out. I would say its very impressive to do that kind of prediction.
Has anyone called Canter and Siegel about this recently? You know I got the T-shirt but they still haven't sued me like they claimed they would.
I received that very first spam at my netcom shell account and read it with Pine.
Over 11 billion smackeroos spent last year in response to spam? Clearly we get it because it *works*, kids. And at $155 an average sale, that's the kind of moolah that can add up pretty quickly. Y'know, now that I think about it, I could quit my job and make some *real* dough hawking augmentation products to the chronically underendowed...
My point was simply that even if there isn't a monetary cost to the economy from spammers, there are other costs which are not insignificant.
There may be a monetary cost, anyway. Organized crime pushes money around - the money doesn't disappear in any of its transactions, even money laundering (where it disappears but comes back elsewhere in a different form). Spammers stealing bandwidth to make money selling individual products is similar, though with less severe consequences to the "end users". The money of the intermediaries which could be used for useful transactions is not used for investment, but for current consumption (as well as the money that the sC^Hpammers make). Investment drives growth in the economy, not consumption - spamming removes money for investment, and thus slows the economy eventually.
The economy depends on choices - the ability to choose where your money goes, and the willingness to take the associated risks. When people's money is spent without their consent (like the gov't, but on a smaller scale, and with less social benefit), they are less likely to trust the market with their livelihood, because it rewards those who do ill. The market works because it has both societal benefits (useful products) and economic benefits. Spammers and their ilk diminish the useful content of the market - if they become a prediction of things to come, then the social benefits of the market (and the social backing for it) will likely decrease.