Slashdot Mirror
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 first spam was a guy who spammed on arpanet for high end computer systems. Am I crazy?
Ironic how an activity started my lawyers winds up facing the threat of becoming illegal.
Maybe not so ironic?
I have been pwned because my
"You can send millions of spam e-mails a day for about a dollar," Cohen said. "That means if one in a million people buy something from you, you break even. Lists of validated bulk postal mail can cost a couple of cents to a dollar per person, and you can grab physical addresses of decision makers with buying power in Fortune 500 companies. But in spam, you don't have to be that selective. You could just say everyone in the United States."
I'm glad that I'm living outside the US and don't have to worry about spam for cheap medicines, for viagra and to vote Ralph Nader. Euhm....
bash$
I want to piss on her grave.
Don't forget that in January of that year a certain Mr Clarence L Thomas IV spammed Usenet with his "Global Alert For All: Jesus is Coming Soon" (10 years and still waiting..) and I robo-cancelled
No, no, no. It's not Microsoft's fault. All of us who were online before Microsoft.com was registered should shoulder the blame. (there were plenty of us, or so it seemed at the time) Back then, there was nothing wrong with cybersquatting. We should have grabbed it when we could. When they finally decided (after almost missing the boat) to get connected to the Internet, we should have held it ransom until they fixed their software.
On behalf of all of us who committed that unpardonable crime, we are sorry.
I'm actually descended of English royalty (and they killed the king at the time) and can trace that side of my family back to 660AD (base 10).
Being able to trace your ancestry back 1400 years is rare indeed.
But being descended from royalty almost certainly isn't.
Consider: you have two parents. That's one generation back -- and let's assume that each generation averages 25 years -- it's actually a bit less, but we'll say 25 to keep things simple. Two generations back, 50 years back, you have 4 grandparents. Three generations back -- 75 years ago -- you have 8 great grandparents.
At this point anyone who's ever used base 2 can see where this is going: number of ancestors is 2 to the power of generations ago, and years ago is generations ago times 25.
So ten generations back is 250 years ago, at which point we need to find 2^10 = 1024 ancestors of that generation.
Twenty generations back, around 1500 CE, we need 2^20 ancestors. That's 1,048,576, or somewhat more than one million.
Thirty generations back, in 1250, we need 2^30 or over a a billion ancestors, just for you. But the estimated world population -- even including those peoples in Australia the Americas not in contact with Europe -- in 1250 is only 400 million. We're "short" more than 600 million people.
How do we account for the "missing" ancestors? It's simple really: in the thirtieth generation back, you indeed had to have had those billion ancestors, but they needn't have been one billion unique ancestors.
Consider: Bob have whatever number of ancestors in generation N that Bob has. Alice also has some number of ancestors in generation N. If Bob and Alice have a child, Chris, together, Chris's ancestors in generation N+1 are simply the union of Bob's ancestors in generation N and Alice's ancestors in generation N. For example's sake, let's set N=2, the generation of Bob and Alice's grandparents. Bob has four grandparents, Alice has four grandparents. So Chris has eight great-grandparents. But if Bob and Alice are cousins, they share two grandparents, and while Chris still has eight great-grandparents (in a manner of speaking) he has only six unique grandparents.
So we can account for those "missing" 673 million ancestors by assuming that there's quite a bit of overlap in everybody's family trees. And indeed, when we consider that breeding most often takes place in a local area -- no Danes were having kids with Australians in 600 CE, and indeed few Frenchmen were crossing the channel to mate with the English, the overlap must be even greater.
Add to this that of the enduring perquisites of success for males -- indeed, for the Darwinist, the only measure of success -- has been access to females, we can assume that a monarch's sexual access was in most cases extensive. Historians tells us that in pre-Columbian America, sometimes a whole village's "crop" of virgin girls would be set aside exclusively for the solely for the Aztec king, on pain of death.
Or consider Moulay Ismail ("the Bloodthirsty") Moroccan Emperor from 1672 to 1727; he's said to have sired eight-hundred eighty eight children on the 500 women of his harem.
While we know of no European monarch this audacious, the tradition of droit du seigneur and the ready availability of "wet-nurses" in royal nurseries attests that kings would be men even in Christendom.
Given this Darwinian competition for sexual access, and the necessary overlapping of family trees, it seems probable that anyone alive today can proudly claim descent from at least one, if not several monarchs -- and our all being "princes of the blood" is, ironically, as good an argument for democracy as any.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
This is a real fucking problem... I want to advertise for an HR guy with half a fucking brain. Or is that a fairy tale just like a guy with 15 years of Linux experience...
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Actually, my guess is they were trying to get around the solicitation rules for lawyers in their state. Most states have restrictions on how lawyers can advertise, and some states are much more strict than others. It is possible they were trying to take advantage of the fact that, at the time, no court had ruled e-mail to be the same as physical junk mail, which was much more heavily restricted.
This article didn't mention it, but I read elsewhere that Laurence Canter was later disbarred, and is nolonger an attorney. If so, maybe there is some justice after all.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
"what do they do if something is only just available?"
They hire the person that lies and says they've been doing it for 10 years. If the HR dept is clueless enough to ask for 10 years of experience with young technology, then they're not going to be smart enough to call you on it.
I guess you could point out that they're requirements are not possible. They'll probably think you're jealous of the 4 guys who interviewed before you that lied about it.
-B
I actually remember where I was ...
I was working for the University of Georgia as a computer lab rat.. checking through my regular newsgroups I saw this post over.. and over.. and over... and I'd seen crossposting before but this just seemed insane.. checking more groups, unrelated ones, and there it was. Dead, alive, made no difference.
I was amazed and gladdened by the reactions I saw.. which varied from "What is this?" (WTF hadn't been coined back then) from "AHHH!!! KILL KILL KILL!", depending on the mental outlook of the readers. Suggestions were made to fax C&S black pieces of paper, call them as much as humanly possible, email them electronic copies of the Bible and Koran, etc etc. It was great to see the backlash.
I even, in my budding nerdom, bought the Joel Furr t-shirt commemorating the occasion.. "Green Card Lawyers, Spamming the Globe!" Even back then, there were t-shirts.