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Happy Spamiversary!

Posted by timothy on from the it-would-have-been-someone dept.

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.

18 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. 1994 by untermensch · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article actually reads 1994, not 1984, after all perl wasn't released until 1987

    1. Re:1994 by LOL+WTF+OMG!!!!!!!!! · · Score: 3, Informative

      So, basically. The story is completely wrong, as spam existed more than 10 years ago.

      --
      That CSS file that blocks ads
    2. Re:1994 by whoever57 · · Score: 3, Informative
      That can't be right. My resume says I have 20 years of Perl experience.

      That's OK, you worked 12 hours per day and the time adds up to the equivalent of 20 years.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    3. Re:1994 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      "the tradition of droit du seigneur"

      I feel I should point out that droit du seigneur is a myth. It never really happened. See this collumn by Cecil Adams:

      http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_181.html

      Dear Cecil:

      Did medieval lords really have the "right of the first night"--that is, the right to be the first to bed the local brides? This figured in the movie Braveheart, and I know I have seen other references to it. I'm not saying the big shots didn't take advantage, but I have a hard time believing this was a generally accepted custom, much less a law. --Paul S. Piper, Honolulu, Hawaii

      Cecil replies:

      My feeling exactly. It's one thing to have your way with the local maidens. It's something else to persuade society as a whole that this is a cool idea. "Sure, honey, we can get married, but first you have to do the rumba with some old guy with bad teeth." Also, once the element of surprise was lost, don't you think this policy would present some risks? Granted women were supposed to be the weaker sex and all, but they knew how to fillet fish.

      The right of the first night--also known as jus primae noctis (law of the first night), droit du seigneur (the lord's right), etc.--has been the subject of locker-room humor and a fair amount of scholarly debate for centuries. Voltaire condemned it in 1762, it's a plot device in Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro, and various old histories refer to it.

      The 16th-century chronicler Boece, for example, says that in ancient times the Scottish king Evenus III decreed that "the lord of the ground sal have the maidinhead of all virginis dwelling on the same." Supposedly this went on for hundreds of years until Saint Margaret persuaded the lords to replace the jus primae noctis with a bridal tax.

      Not likely. Skeptics point out that (1) there never was any King Evenus, (2) Boece included a lot of other stuff in his account that was clearly mythical, and (3) he was writing long after the alleged events.

      The story is pretty much the same all over. If you believe the popular tales, the droit du seigneur prevailed throughout much of Europe for centuries. Yet detailed examinations of the available records by reputable historians have found "no evidence of its existence in law books, charters, decretals, trials, or glossaries," one scholar notes. No woman ever commented on the practice, unfavorably or otherwise, and no account ever identifies any female victim by name.

      It's true that in some feudal jurisdictions there was something known as the culagium, the requirement that a peasant get permission from his lord to marry. Often this required the payment of a fee. Some say the fee was a vestige of an earlier custom of buying off the lord so he wouldn't get physical with the bride.

      Similarly, ecclesiastical authorities in some regions demanded a fee before a new husband was allowed to sleep with his wife. Some think this means the clergy once upon a time exercised the right of the first night too. But come on, how many first nights can one woman have? What did these guys do, take a number?

      The more likely interpretation is that the culagium was an attempt by the nobles to make sure they didn't lose their serfs by marriage to some neighboring lord. The clerical marriage fee, meanwhile, was apparently paid by newlyweds to get out of a church requirement for a three-day precoital waiting period. (You were supposed to pray during this time and get yourself in the proper frame of mind. Guess they figured a leather teddy wouldn't do it.)

      Did the droit du seigneur exist elsewhere in the world? Possibly in some primitive societies. But most of the evidence for this is pathetically lame--unreliable travelers' accounts and so on.

      A few holdouts claim we don't have any definite evidence that the right of the first night didn't exist. But I'd say most reputable historians today would agree that the jus primae noctis, in Europe anyway, was strictly a male fantasy.

      None of this is to suggest that men in power didn't or don't use their positions to extort sex from women. But since when did some creep with a sword (gun, fancy office, drill sergeant's stripes) figure he needed a law to justify rape?

      --CECIL ADAMS

  2. Re:Please by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Not the first spam, but a new level of chatter by btempleton · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  4. Take a walk down memory lane! by jelson · · Score: 4, Informative

    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. Re:Take a walk down memory lane! by Caradoc · · Score: 4, Informative

      I was actually a user on the ISP from which Canter and Siegel spammed - "Internet Direct," in Phoenix, Arizona.

      We were pretty much without e-mail for three or four days as the world reacted to their Usenet spam runs.

      There's a pretty good synopsis of the whole mess at the Spam Warz page. Scroll down to "Enter the Spam Warriors."

      --
      Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
  5. The original usenet post by tintub · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those who are interested: The first use of 'spam' for spam

    --
    sig under construction...
  6. Re:I thought... by Nuclear+Elephant · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. This was reported on over a month ago by GabeK · · Score: 3, Informative

    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]
  8. Re:Lawyers Started Spam... by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 5, Informative
    I remember vividly when this happened (ten years ago, when "the Internet" usually meant USENET as opposed to the WWW). Before, "bad behavior" meant poor "netiquette"- crossposting to a dozen or so USENET groups. That was what pissed people off. But even the crossposters were flabbergasted by this. It seems trite now, but back in 1994, nobody had even dreamed of posting a message to every single USENET newsgroup in existence. The very idea was crazy. Posts were things you typed into newsreaders. You'd need to write a script to crosspost to every single newsgroup. Who would ever do that? It was just too incredible to believe.

    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:
    "...some starry-eyed individuals who access the Net think of Cyberspace as a community with rules, regulations and codes of behavior. Don't you believe it! There is no community. ...Along your journey, someone may try to tell you that in order to be a good Net 'citizen,' you must follow the rules of the Cyberspace community. Don't listen. The only laws and rules with which you should concern yourself are those passed by the country, state, and city in which you truly live..."

    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".
  9. Re:Lawyers Started Spam... by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. Interview with Lawrence Canter by frozenray · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  11. Re:I thought... by Wullis · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  12. wasn't the first spam sent out in 1978? by neckdeepinspecialsau · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  13. Re:Lawyers Started Spam... by rpresser · · Score: 3, Informative
    I remember vividly when this happened (ten years ago, when "the Internet" usually meant USENET as opposed to the WWW). Before, "bad behavior" meant poor "netiquette"- crossposting to a dozen or so USENET groups. That was what pissed people off. But even the crossposters were flabbergasted by this. It seems trite now, but back in 1994, nobody had even dreamed of posting a message to every single USENET newsgroup in existence. The very idea was crazy. Posts were things you typed into newsreaders. You'd need to write a script to crosspost to every single newsgroup. Who would ever do that? It was just too incredible to believe.

    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.
  14. The main spam run was April 12 by frankie · · Score: 3, Informative
    Their March 5 spam was just a preliminary test. The big infamy that put the Green Card Lawyers on the map was April 12, 1994. That was the first truly modern spam:
    • commercial advert
    • fully automated spam engine
    • forged headers (in this case, moderation approval)
    • three-rules compliant

    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 /dev/random to indirect.com that day.