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!
...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.
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. :)
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.
The black market revenues for hard drugs is in the billions as well, yet no one praises its economic benefits outside of criminal circles.
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?"
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.
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.
I know, I know. Offtopic. Lighten up though, it's SPAM!!
I don't believe the parent is a troll, just an attempt at spam humour (overlord reference). It should rate as "Score:0,funny."
A minor point, but important for a fair moderation system.
The topic of spam inspires humour i.e.: Monty Python.It's a tradition here :)
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
I personally use Spambayes. It runs on my Outlook client and employs Bayesian heuristics and the few messages that do get through I mark as spam to even better train the system. Although I haven't tangibly recorded the success ratio I would estimate that it was about 95% effective the first week of usage. After training it that amount of time it has been about 99% effective. Rather than download and update all of the DNS blacklist stuff the Bayesian filtering seems to do the job. Even those weird random word messages or haiku deals get flagged.
So, that's how much a penis enlarger costs.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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
Actually you are wrong as well. You have combined two different historical examples. One was a USENET religious posting about Jesus coming again, while the other was a DEC promotional message sent out via ARPANET. Scan the posts on this topic. The 1978 subject line post gives specific examples about what I am referring to...
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.
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.
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
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$25q@herald.indirect.com>
NNTP-Posting-Ho
Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.
The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a
permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.
PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.
The only countries NOT qualifying are: Mexico; India; P.R. China;
Taiwan, Philippines, North Korea, Canada, United Kingdom (except
Northern Ireland), Jamaica, Domican Republic, El Salvador and
Vietnam.
Lottery registration will take place soon. 55,000 Green Cards will be
given to those who register correctly. NO JOB IS REQUIRED.
THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS
NOW!!
For FREE information via Email, send request to
cslaw@indirect.com
nt
Hurry! Buy CHEAP viagra NOW!!! Supplies are limited and this is our special INTERNET ONLY pricing!!!!!
asd;$@%;lasfj43164a;kja;ldsjf
To be removed from this list please send an email to this address with the string "LKJA245JL" in the subject line
Damn. Need to remember to turn off that script.
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.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
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
Yes, you're completely right. It's totally absurd to think that spam is profitable. He has a strong incentive to lie, and convince people with dubious ethics that it might be worth a try, therefore increasing his competition.
It makes no sense that someone would continue spamming because they are making money.
Obviously, spammers are spamming because it's fun to annoy system administrators, not because it's possible to make money doing it.
Being clever and having poor ethics are not mutually exclusive. Your rules are dumb.
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.
I can second that. I read about Spambayes here on slashdot only a few months ago. I had some problems with it identifying legit messages as spam at first, but once it was trained and I tweaked a few other settings, it's pretty reliable. I dip into the spam folder about once a week, and right now it's error rate is about one falsely identified e-mail every two weeks or so, something in the neighborhood of 200 correctly tagged pieces of spam in that same timeframe, and around 100 correctly tagged pieces of "good" mail.
I wish it had an option to let messages through from anybody in my address book. That would literally eliminate all of the false tagging as spam that I see right now. That's minor, though -- at the rate it has been improving, I figure within a couple months the false hits should drop off to almost nothing.
You can transfer everything it has learned to another machine, so as an interesting experiment, once that happens I'm going to put it on my wife's machine and see how well my rules apply to her mail.
It's definitely worth checking out, and give it a few days to do some learning and notice how it steadily improves.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.
I say we go back to the days of stocks, pillories and public humiliation in an effort to stop spam. You get caught buying something via spam, you get hauled to the city square, shackeled to a post, and the rest of us get to throw rotten tomatoes at you. For example, buy Cialis and you get to spend your "special weekend" in the stocks.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
It seems to me this "survey" could be used by spam marketers to sell their services to potential clients. Something's fishy about this one.
The late, unlamented CyberPromo [Sanford Wallace] was a nusance back about 1991 or so, when all I has was a Compu$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.
I'm not a spammer, but I'm a pretty good liar. You don't lie about things that are totally obvious, and that you have no reason to lie about. Such as saying that spammers spam because they make money that way.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
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.)
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.
People don't do things because they recieved a positive reward for doing it in the past. People do things because they expect a positive reward for it in the future. Often, the two are related. But, for gullible people involved in get-quick-rich schemes like sending spam, there often isn't any relation at all. Gullible people will send spam expecting to make money, and then, for any one of a thousand reasons, will tell other people they did make money. Now, more gullible people expect to make money sending spam.
Right now, spam is just another get-rich-quick scheme, just like multi-level marketing and late night real-estate infomercials. I have no reason to believe that the mouth-breathers bragging about getting rich sending spam are telling the truth. They tell people they are rich. They may even believe they are rich. But I have never seen any evidence (apart from their own testimony) that they are rich.
And, a thousand slashdot posts later, a million more people are convinced that people send spam because it makes money.
NO. People send spam because they're inconsiderate, stupid assholes hoping to get-rich-quick on the internet.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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.
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.