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Happy Spamiversary!
Shippy writes "Ten years ago today, a pair of Arizona attorneys launched a homemade marketing software program that forever changed the Internet. It was the birth of spam. They did this by whipping up a Perl script that flooded message boards advertising their legal services." Update: 04/14 05:26 GMT by S : That'd be ten years ago, not twenty.
The article actually reads 1994, not 1984, after all perl wasn't released until 1987
WARNING, do not click! Please, mods, do your fucking job.
A salesman from Digital had the first spam on ARPAnet years before this... Digital didn't have much west coast name power, so a salesdude shot off an email with a malformed header. RMS got a copy second hand if you'd like to google it.
They were husband and wife, and this was before gay marriage was popular, so you can be pretty sure that only one was a man and considering the nature of their actions, I think "gentle" is not quite the right adjective for either.
Nevertheless, the female died a few years back after they were both disbarred in Florida, or Tenessee or maybe Arizona, they were licensed in a number of states. I think the male went on to be a used car dealer or something quite suitably of that ilk.
Oh, and to the article poster/slash non-editors, 20 years: Were you trying to give me sudden mid-life crisis syndrome or what? Like I don't feel old enough already not being a part of a flash-mob super-computer, geeze...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The Canter and Siegel spam was not the first spam, nor the first commercial abuse, nor the first to be called a spam. (The term SPAM had been used to describe flooding on MUDS since the early 90s, and had been applied to USENET floods about a year before.)
The C&S spam had two firsts to it. One, they were the first to not turn tail and run after seeing the anger of the net. Prior spammers had quickly given up. C&S fought back.
That leads to first #2, they caused a lot of conversation and awareness, and that led to the term going mainstream, away from just lesser use in newsgroups and MUDS.
A while ago I wrote a history of the term spam and the early spam events. You may find it useful in tracing the history of this and other events.
Two of the big anniversaries were about a year ago. The 25th anniversary of the first E-mail spam I found, and the 10th anniversary of the term SPAM being used to describe a USENET flooding.
The first really big USENET spam was january of 94, it was religious. A big commercial spam dates back to the 80s, and jj@cup.portal.com.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
1867!!
http://www.hormel.com/brands/brandview3.asp?id=2
I like it fried on a sandwich with honey mustard.
Jay | http://oldos.org
lightspawn writes "Thiry nine days ago today, A pair of slashdot editors launched a homemade article that forever changed the celebrating of Spam's Ten-Year Anniversary.
I vividly remember when Canter and Siegel spammed us on USENET. I even bought the "Green Card Lawyers - Spamming the Globe" T-Shirt from Joel Furr.
But I don't think that was actually the first widespread spam. A few months earlier -- in January 1994 -- was the similarly infamous "Global Alert For All: Jesus is Coming Soon" spam... does anyone remember that? It wasn't commercial spam per se, but still spam.
I spent the next few days collecting various funny responses to the spam from dozens of different newsgroups. A few years ago, I put my compilation on the web. Just doing my part to make sure nothing on the Internet ever dies.
1) It was ten years ago, not twenty. Most of the people online today weren't online ten years ago - that's why a friend of mine (online at the time) called it (in the late 80s) "the world's biggest secret club" - the only way you knew about it is if you were on it. (and if you weren't online, serious odds were that you didn't know about it).
2) What they did wasn't spam. They merely flooded usenet.
3) The original spam was actually long before this usenet posting (and it was email).
I have to hand it to the poster and the article they cited. Three strikes and they're stupid. Not bad for a newbie.
Just in case anyone wants to check it out, this is his website. http://www.l-ware.com/
For those who are interested: The first use of 'spam' for spam
sig under construction...
Actually there were other spams before Canter & Siegel, such as the Jesus Spam and Jay-Jay's College fund. What made C&S so hated was the fact that they were not only the first people to abuse the Internet using bulk-spam software, but as people complained more about them, they kept getting more popular by the day. They eventually wrote a terrible book on marketing and the Internet. People hated them with a passion when they announced they were going to start up a spam business. For the record, Canter eventually got disbarred by the TN bar assoc. partly for spamming.
Check this out. It was already reported on. The first Canter & Siegel spam was sent out on March 5th, 1994. You can see that in the article and on Wikipedia.
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
Anyway, that one spam post was all anyone could talk about for a week! And on hundreds of groups, people were posting followups to the original post, warning any foreigners that might be reading that the service being offered (they were selling an opportunity to enter the INS green card lottery, IIRC) was available from the U.S. Government for free. (Didn't help- they still made a fortune.) I remember the green card lottery post being mentioned prominently in the Cyberscope column in U.S. News (the print version). Everyone was just stunned that someone would do this.
The posters wrote a book on how to make a fortune on the "Information Superhighway" (this is what the Internet was called during 1994, before everyone learned its real name). It was full of lovely quotes:
These are the kind of lawyers who keep meth lab guard dogs in their apartments. Now we should resist lawyer-bashing. There are a lot of asshat lawyers around, and it's a real struggle sometimes to keep in mind that most of the rights we hold dear in this country would be empty, unenforceable, and meaningless if we were to give in to our desires to round them up and keep them in concentration camps. My own wife is a lawyer and never made more than $30k as a public defender (before she quit the profession entirely- she's a stripper now). But it's really striking how you can be a lawyer and be a total scumbag, too. It seems scumminess does not interfere at all with lawyering.
Anyway, this is getting away from my point, which is to reminisce about the end of the spam-free days, and to impress on you young kiddies that this was a really big deal when it happened. The second guy who did it didn't get one tenth as much attention. The first one you see is the one that makes you say, "well, there goes the Internet".
You're not crazy, that's in the article. So the title is kind of misleading.. They're just focusing on the event 10 years ago that really pissed everybody off, with the Green Card Lottery. That one didn't piss me off as much as that stupid MAKE.MONEY.FAST and subsequent spam later claiming the guy had been caught, but the FBI agent named had already been dead for awhile..
Anyone remember those good old days when you would get an unsolicited email, reply to postmaster@domain with a suitably indignant response, and actually get something back from the postmaster saying, "Thank you for bringing this to our attention, our policy blah blah, the user has been suspended permanently, blah blah" That was so cool.. They weren't doing much header-forging back then, it was easy and fun to have them yanked.
3 is not a valid digit in base 3.
and now a physical address: 4035 Alexander Valley Lane Healdsburg, California 95448
The stripper part was a lie. But it was fun lie to tell. The rest of it is true- she was a public defender, not appearing directly in court. She reviewed cases for prisoners that were in the appeals process. She's no longer practicing law after quickly realizing she hated it. She had a very short legal career.
20 (mod 5)=0
Yes? What does that have to do with what he is saying?
(2*5^1)+(0*5^0)=10
Any number whose last digit is 0 in base 5x is going to give you (mod 5)=0. Except that there is no digit 5 in base 5.
Heisenberg might have been here.
Web boards today aren't bulletproof against spam, but they've at least raised the bar high enough that the cost of writing a program to defeat the security would wipe out any profits from a spam exercise.
Not at all. The reason that it isn't that popular is that with web boards, each server may simply change the posting process a little, breaking compatibility with any script with little effort at all, including their own past system.
While on Usenet, it's write once, run everywhere because you can't change the standard. And you can't do proper filtering either because you "have to" relay messages. It's far more of a distributed/central issue than nntp/http.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Here
Quoting from it:
-----
How many people received the "Green Card Lottery" spam? Did you generate any business from it?
It was in the tens of thousands. Yes, we generated a lot of business. The best I can recall we probably made somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000 related to that--which wasn't remarkable in itself, except that the cost of doing it was negligible.
-----
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
IIRC Clarence Thomas's Jesus spam was mid-Jan 94, and the first major C+S one was on the 9th Feb. (I think JJ was quite a bit earlier, but I didn't generate cancels for that one.)
GC article from soc.culture.turkish
This is correct. The first spam was not sent in 1994, but in 1978. It was sent by Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation to a total of 320 recipents.
Here it is: http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html
1978: The first internet E-mail spam, sent by DEC Einar Stefferud, a longtime net hand, reports that DEC announced a new DEC-20 machine in 1978 by sending an invite to all ARPANET addresses on the west coast, using the ARPANET directory, inviting people to receptions in California. They were chastised for breaking the ARPANET appropriate use policy, and a notice was sent out reminding others of the rule. content of the first spam and response: http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html
Part of the outrage was that the spammers did not crosspost. Their script posted separately to each newsgroup. If they had crossposted, then the spam message would occupy a small amount of space on each server, but as separate posts, it occupied thousands of times as much. Some small sites with small retention were seriously hurt.
Tom St. Denis said:
//, ".URRUUxR";
/^[P.]/ && close $_
/^r/ ? <$_> : 1 } %pipestate;
/\S/;
.
Code blocks like that don't really impress me.
Anyone can write code, remove all white-space,
use terse meaningless variable names and call
it "l33t".
I don't think that's what I did when I wrote this code. I only took out the whitespace because I wanted to use the code as my usenet signature, and the Usenet etiquette limits signatures to four lines.
Here's a version of the same program that has the proper whitespace and variable and function names.
If you take the time to look at it closely I think you're more likely to find it impressive.
(Here's a hint: the most important part of the program is the string ".URRUUxR". If you think you understand this program, but you don't understand why this string contains those particular characters, then you don't understand the program.)
@STATE = split
@data = split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";
sub make_pipe_and_fork {
@pipestate{"r$fhno", "u$fhno"}=(P,P);
pipe "r$fhno", "u$fhno";
++$fhno;
($pid *= 2) += $is_child = !fork();
map {
$STATE=$STATE[$is_child | ord($pipestate{$_}) & 6];
$pipestate{$_} = (/^$STATE/i ? $STATE : close $_);
} keys %pipestate
}
make_pipe_and_fork;
make_pipe_and_fork;
make_pipe_and_fork;
make_pipe_and_fork;
make_pipe_and_fork;
map {
$pipestate{$_} =~
} %pipestate;
wait until $?;
map {
$_ = $data[$pid];
sleep rand(2) if
print
For hints and explanataions, see my web site at
http://perl.plover.com/obfuscated/
Click here
Yes, there were previous incidents. The Arpanet DEC spam was much earlier, but it was manually typed by a secretary. Zumabot was an earlier robospammer, but he was noncommercial. April 12 1994 is the true Pearl Harbor (or 9-11, for the historically challenged) of spam. The day that convinced us it was time to fight back hard.
Show of hands: who else here remembers exactly where you were (and what you felt) when you saw Green Card Lottery in every newsgroup? I spent a good long time mailbombing dumps from