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.

Comments

The new math?

[blueskyred]

2004 - 1994 = 20 years? I don't understand that score at all.

Re:The new math?

[whoever57]

Even PERL did not exist in 1984! It was released in 1987.

Re:The new math?

[DAldredge]

PERL has always existed.
PERL is mother.
PERL is father.
Humans where deamed advanced enought in 1987 for PERL to be shown to them.
PERL is everything (Including the secret behind happy fun ball).

Re:The new math?

[Tuxinatorium]

Well, maybe 20 years in base 5? I guess we could say Bush's IQ is 300 in base 4?

Re:The new math?

[product byproduct]

A pair of Arizona attorneys sent the spam 10 years ago each, for a total of 20 years ago.

Re:The new math?

[MoFoQ]

the guy posting must be using one of those flawy pentium cpu's....or is in PR/marketing/spindoc

Re:The new math?

[thunderflash21]

give em a break. it's probably a typo. the 2 is very close to the 1 after all...

Re:The new math?

[Snad]

A pair of Arizona attorneys sent the spam 10 years ago each, for a total of 20 years ago.

Ah so it's not new math, it's RIAA math...

Re:The new math?

[Bobdoer]

You know, it kind of makes an odd sort of sense that lawyers were the first spammers. Aren't they the first to ruin most fun things?

Re:The new math?

[Anonymous Coward]

typo? it's written in word form... "...Twenty years ago today..." it's hard to beleive that w, t, and y were accidentally pressed in such convenient order. Me, i'll take the pair of 10s explaination.

Re:The new math?

[Nuclear Elephant]

If you count that in PERL years, it's 110 years.

Re:The new math?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the way lawyers bill, the story should say "240 years ago."

Re:The new math?

[Shippy]

Bah, you got me there! I realized it after I hit submit (yeah yeah) and figured they'd reject my story for it. ;) Maybe next time I won't take those shots of Grey Goose before trying to submit a story.

Re:The new math?

[phyast]

20 (mod 5) = 0

for Bush's IQ I think you meant base 3.

Re:The new math?

[Anonymous Coward]

3 is not a valid digit in base 3.

Re:The new math?

[MikeDX]

there is no such thing as 300 in base 3, thats like saying your iq is 200 (in binary)

Re:The new math?

[escallywag]

You know, it kind of makes an odd sort of sense that lawyers were the first spammers

The road to hell is paved with lawyers you know.. Demons like to ski on them...

Re:The new math?

[Planx_Constant]

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.

Re:The new math?

[essreenim]

Spam was forged in the fires of Mt. Doom in Arizona.

Only there can it be unmade.

Re:The new math?

[foobsr]

PERL has always existed.

PERL is mother.

PERL is father.

Humans where deamed advanced enought in 1987 for PERL to be shown to them.

PERL is everything (Including the secret behind happy fun ball).

Yes?

@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q *=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_ }=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[ P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];slee p rand(2)if/\S/;print

from

CC.

Re:The new math?

[tomstdenis]

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". My classes are full of people like that. Except they're not doing it intentionally.

What is at least somewhat cool is people who make designs out of code that still compile [e.g. dolphins, trees, etc...]

Also I saw a "fork"in there.... i dunno if I would run a Perl script that I can't decipher with a fork in there.... actually I wouldn't run perl scripts like that at all unless I was some dummy user without access to my home dir...

Tom

Re:The new math?

[uncoveror]

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.

Re:The new math?

[nizo]

I can only hope that the contact email they posted is on every single spammers list so they have been getting flooded with spam email for 10 years now (especially the penis enlargment spams).

Re:The new math?

[mjd]

Tom St. Denis said:

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 //, ".URRUUxR";
@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 {
$pipestate{$_} =~ /^[P.]/ && close $_
} %pipestate;

wait until $?;

map { /^r/ ? <$_> : 1 } %pipestate;

$_ = $data[$pid];
sleep rand(2) if /\S/;
print

For hints and explanataions, see my web site at
http://perl.plover.com/obfuscated/ .

Re:The new math?

[stephenbooth]

Actually it's frozen door to door sales men. At weekends the younger demons go skating on them.

Stephen

PS If any one is confused, it's a reference to "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

Re:The new math?

[DAldredge]

Haven't you noticed how most 'religious' rants on the internet have at least one glaring error? :->

Re:The new math?

[red floyd]

I thought that was when Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play?

1994

[untermensch]

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

Re:1994

[LOL WTF OMG!!!!!!!!!]

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

Re:1994

[Radical Rad]

after all perl wasn't released until 1987

That can't be right. My resume says I have 20 years of Perl experience.

Re:1994

[whoever57]

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.

Re:1994

[superpulpsicle]

That's nothing. A recruiter in 98 called me once to see if I can provide reference for a friend with 10 years of windows 98 experience.

Re:1994

[Geek of Tech]

Don't worry. My resume says that I'm a trained astronaut, Iron Chef and that I'm fluent in Klingon. And that I was the king of england at one point in my life....

Strangely, I haven't got a job yet. I guess managers just don't like know-it-alls....

Re:1994

[MikeDawg]

Probably because of the fact that you said you were fluent in Klingon.

Re:1994

[ottffssent]

Schizophrenic?

Re:1994

[Anonymous Coward]

No UL/FOAF

Someone called in the late 90s, looking for someone with ten years of Linux experience. The response? "Well, the only person I know who can even come close to that is Linus Torvalds." "Great! Can you tell me how to contact him?"

Then again, I remember headhunters looking for people with five years of experience with Access in 92, 93, 94. Access came out in November 1992 (and only cost $99).

Re:1994

[orthogonal]

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.

Re:1994

[Brandybuck]

It's standard industry practice. My company is currently looking for .NET developers with ten years experience. Two years the company tried to get us to take a C# class taught by a professor with five years of C# experience.

Re:1994

[ozric99]

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.

Oh, wait. I know this one! I'm driving the train!

Re:1994

[John Courtland]

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...

Re:1994

[OwlWhacker]

So, companies that require 10 years experience in a particular field, what do they do if something is only just available? Do they wait for 10 years before hiring anybody to work in that area?

Experience using Windows isn't really worth much anyway. I'm sure we all know people that have used Windows since 95 was released and still hardly know how to use it.

Re:1994

[c0p0n]

I am working on a enterprise that asked me 5 years of Win98 experience... on 2001. So I modified my CV to this:

- Advanced knowledge of the Windows 98 Operating System, since its first version launched on 1995

Re:1994

[Anonymous Coward]

"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

Re:1994

[AndroidCat]

No, I'm sure that HR people with half a brain exist. It's the far end of the curve, but there must be some of them.

Re:1994

[smatt-man]

Don't forget Kevin Bacon.

Re:1994

[f0rt0r]

Yeah, me too...and I also have 10 years Windows 2003 Server experience.

Re:1994

[ghereheade]

It's called in breeding. This is just a long winded explaination of the simple fact that

YOUR FAMILY TREE DON'T FORK!!!

Re:1994

[stupid_is]

Unless, of course, Bob is from Cornwall, in which case there may be a vastly reduced gene pool due to the "Uncle Dad" effect....

Re:1994

[Reziac]

No, no, no. How long did it take to fill the bath??

Re:1994

[Ralph Wiggam]

"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

Re:1994

[Duhavid]

No, he has just *billed* for 20 years worth of perl development. Like the lawyers, ya-know.

Re:1994

[connorbd]

actually droit du seigneur is an urban legend -- I forget exactly where I saw it debunked, but there's no evidence of it ever actually being practiced.

Re:1994

[JSR $FDED]

This tradition is usually referred to as "droit de cuissage", which means "thigh right".

Yeah, they weren't very good at anatomy back then.

jerks

[PeaceTank]

man, those people should be shot

/me raises wine glass

[Steamhead]

And i've never been so full. *opens spam container*

It's 2014!!!???

[Anonymous Coward]

Twenty years ago? Where the hell have I been for the last ten years?

Re:It's 2014!!!???

[isorox]

Deleting spam

20 years, or 10?

[Vlet]

April 12, 1994

math is so hard

Re:20 years, or 10?

[Vargasan]

It makes my head hurt.

Re:20 years, or 10?

[MoFoQ]

and they say california's education system is so bad.

Re:20 years, or 10?

[balster neb]

Obviously 10. When the article came out a couple of days ago, it had a headline on the lines of "Ten Candles on Spam's Cake"

I thought...

[ev1lcanuck]

the first spam was a guy who spammed on arpanet for high end computer systems. Am I crazy?

Re:I thought...

[LostCluster]

I think the seperation depends on your definition of Spam. I think that was the first attempt to use ARPAnet for commerical gain (something that the reasearchers had to scratch their heads over) while the perl stunt was the first mass-posting of any kind.

Re:I thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

the first spam was a guy who spammed on arpanet for high end computer systems. Am I crazy?

At least you're not crazy enough to read the article.

Re:I thought...

[G27 Radio]

The first time I recall hearing the term spam was on FidoNet a couple years prior to the lawyer spam. When I asked where the term came from I was told that it stood for Self-Propelled Advertising Material.

I think the whole ten year spam anniversary thing is made up by people that didn't get Internet access until after Windows 95 came out.

Re:I thought...

[Nuclear Elephant]

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.

Re:I thought...

[Feanturi]

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.

Re:I thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the whole ten year spam anniversary thing is made up by people that didn't get Internet access until after Windows 95 came out.

wow, you do math as well as the authors

Re:I thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I thought...

[Wullis]

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

Re:I thought...

[mdfst13]

"while the perl stunt was the first mass-posting of any kind"

Nope, not even that. It was the first automated cross post that spammed *all* the newsgroups without actually using the crosspost mechanism (some redundancy in this statement). I.e. you can send messages to multiple newsgroups by putting multiple groups in the appropriate field. People had been using that regularly in 1994, leading to clients that would block messages crossposted to more than x newsgroups (where x could be anything from 1 up). The Perl script got around the crosspost blocking mechanism.

It was a milestone, but it wasn't much of a first. It is purely arbitrary picking it as an anniversary. It was not the first commercial post, nor the first sent to all the newsgroups. It did not send to private emails, nor did it forge headers (at least I don't think that it did), etc. Personally, I would consider the first automated UCE sent to email addresses to be the first spam. No idea what that is though.

Re:I thought...

[Himring]

Haha! TN bar association? The first spammer was from TN?!? This puts a whole new spin on "deliverance...."

Re:I thought...

[ZX-3]

The term "spam" was already in use to describe lots of unexpected and unwanted output from computers before it started to refer specifically to mass junk email.

For example, in a college computer lab in 1993, I remember the attendent complaining about people sending postscript files to the shared line printer and having it "spam" paper.

Please

[mao che minh]

Do tell me when these two gentlemen have passed. It is at that moment, that momentous and glorious occassion to come, that I will celebrate and send praise on high.

Re:Please

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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...

Re:Please

[Erratio]

It amazes me that lawyers, the upholders of justice among an unfair world, could have been the people behind spam. Surely they must have been ostracized by their benevolent peers.

Re:Please

[Brandybuck]

this was before gay marriage was popular

Dude, anything before this current year was "before gay marriage was popular".

Re:Please

[DarkSarin]

I'm sorry, you've got it wrong--again. (sheesh, who is this 'Anonymous Coward' guy anyway--he's annoying!)

It was the Romans who were into that.

Re:Please

[Brandybuck]

Notice the reach way back a couple of millenia to find gay marriage popularity.

Re:Please

[Brandybuck]

No, before every other modern culture as well. Is gay marriage popular in Bhuddist, Hindu and Shintoist cultures? Even in the ancient Rome mentioned earlier it wasn't popular outside of a narrow decadent nobility.

Hey, Shippy, fix your clock

[Fear the Clam]

Nice editing there, timothy.

so what this is saying is...

[deathazre]

that we should blame perl for all our spam?

Re:so what this is saying is...

[Camel Pilot]

no we should just blame the lawyers...

Re:so what this is saying is...

[Reziac]

See what happens when you let 'em breed? We SHOULD have taken that good advice, and killed all the lawyers!!

Re:so what this is saying is...

[Pig Hogger]

that we should blame perl for all our spam?

no we should just blame the lawyers...

PERL-using lawyers?
Shudder!!!

Fatal flaw in Usenet...

[LostCluster]

This was a knockout blow to Usenet as the mainstream way of Internet peer-publication, as you might notice that Slashdot here is a web-based interface and so are the other mainstream "web-boards" that are commonly in use.

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.

Re:Fatal flaw in Usenet...

[AndroidCat]

So using a large number of proprietary systems rather than a universal standard is a good thing?

Re:Fatal flaw in Usenet...

[DrCode]

Congratulations, sir! Your comment was exactly #1,000,000 in our internet postings contest, and you have won the grand prize of 250,000 (two-hundred-fifty-thousand) U.S. dollars. Please contact our administrator, Ms. Lotta Leggs, to provide us with the information we need to transfer your prize money.

Heh

[ObviousGuy]

Ironic how an activity started my lawyers winds up facing the threat of becoming illegal.

Maybe not so ironic?

Re:Heh

[D'Sphitz]

While they may (or may not have) been the first, they didn't start anything. If they had never been born, SPAM would still exist in the state it does now. They didn't birth anything, they just used a rather obvious idea of trying to sell shit on the net.

Just Great!

[dakan]

Isn't it great that we can "celebrate" the start of such a huge annoyance? I think I can truthfully say i liked SPAM better when it was a processed meat product.

Re:Just Great!

[Himring]

Our support-desk people held a big "celebrating the 100,000th support call" or whatever number it was -- dunno, coulda been a million or 10,000, how do I know -- anyhow, upper management was none-to-pleased about the whole thing as it came across to the corporation as "celebrating 100,000 problems!..."

Re:And here's the US government's response...

[Anonymous Coward]

WARNING, do not click! Please, mods, do your fucking job.

Surprise?

[Comatose51]

Anyone surprised by the fact that it was a pair of LAWYERS that started this? Guess ambulance chasing wasn't bringing in enough money.

(J/K, There are some lovable lawyers, like the EFF and FSF ones :-))

Re:Surprise?

[JazzXP]

I thought only the dead ones were lovable?

Time to be festive!

[pararox]

So where is the festival to be?

It was bound to happen

[Steve the Rocket Sci]

Even without these people, it was most definitely bound to happen. Telemarketing and mass mailing have been the norm for so many years, it's almost inevitable that they would find a place in the digital realm. That being said: [British] "I don't like spam!" [/British]

Spam on ARPAnet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:That's not true.

[LostCluster]

It's the work of a few hours to write a perl/python/php script that works with a few dozen proxies to flood the shit out of a blog or web board.

A single web board, sure... but the USENET spam was one against every forum in existance at the time. You can't do that in one script, there are too many differences between the various implementations.

Sometimes standards are a strength, sometimes it's a weakness...

The _real_ question

[whoever57]

Did anyone actually get a green card because of their services?

Did anyone actually pay them for the privilege of receiving widely available information?

Wow, time really flies!

[mh101]

I can't believe it's 2014 already! After all, if today's the 20th anniversary of the first spam from back in '94...

Lawyers Started Spam...

[Landaras]

Well, you know what they say about lawyers...

It's only 99% of them that give the 1% a bad name.

- Neil Wehneman

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[MillionthMonkey]

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".

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[InfiniteZero]

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).

Dude, I really don't know whether we should feel sad or glad for you. All I can say is... which club does she work at?

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[G-funk]

Well thanks.... I was happilly reading your rather intelligent post, and abosorbing a little bit of net history (about a year before I got online), and then BAM! You ruined it.... Now there's only one thing I remember from your whole post...

Your wife's a stripper?

Curse you! *turns green*

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[MillionthMonkey]

OK, the stripper part was a lie. But the rest of it is God's honest truth!

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[InfiniteZero]

All I can say is... which club does she work at?

Why, you wanna spam his wife?

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[tehcyder]

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).

I would love to believe this, I really, really would. I can't see how it would be a troll as being anti-lawyer is the /. norm.

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[rastos1]

Well as far as I know, they say this about lawyers:

Do you know what 20000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea is?
A good start.

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[rpresser]

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.

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[Paulrothrock]

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).

Now we know you're lying. Heh.

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[87C751]

And remember the tech of the time. Not too long before C&S pulled their stunt, the news admin at U of Minnesota (Hi, Danny! :) proudly told me he had procured a 1 GB drive for the news server. He said it would give the site 7 day retention on everything but the binaries groups (which would only have 3-day retention).

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[MillionthMonkey]

Part of the outrage was that the spammers did not crosspost. Their script posted separately to each newsgroup.

Yes, I forgot that detail! People lost their newsfeeds because of it. And C&S poured gasoline on the fire because they were completely unapologetic to those whose resources they stole, and even went so far as publicly promising more spam. They thought they were geniuses for inventing such an effective marketing strategy. They really acted like they invented the Internet with that stupid post.
It was funny how different newsgroups reacted. Nowadays everyone ignores this stuff and deletes it. And in most groups there were no responses to that post. But back then, in this case, people replied to it and started threads around it in groups like alt.peeves and alt.revenge. There were discussions going on all over the place about how lawyers suck, what the green card lottery was, whether the spam was a sign of things to come or just a one-time thing, etc. Most people understood that it wasn't the last time this would happen, but I don't think even the pessimists grasped the scale of just how bad it would get.

Re:Lawyers Started Spam...

[lrucker]

Part of the outrage was that the spammers did not crosspost.

Also, with crossposting, if you had a decent newsreader you'd see the message only once then it would be marked read in the next group you looked at - with separate posts, you saw it again in every group.

When the Green Card spam hit, I was at ParcPlace, porting Smalltalk to the PowerMac.

In Other News..

[Marko DeBeeste]

The hemerrhoid celebrates it's 20,000th anniversary. Pardon me, 10,000th. And it wasn't invented by a lawyer, but when one was transplanted, the hemerrhoid rejected the lawyer.

Not the first spam, but a new level of chatter

[btempleton]

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.

Re:Not the first spam, but a new level of chatter

[Feanturi]

Late night MUDding, people get bored sometimes and start shouting favorite song lyrics or performing favorite sketches.. Inevitably someone would start that particular sketch..

Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Dufus says, 'So let's kill this thing...'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Filbert says, 'Ok'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Dufus says, 'Let's wait till the spamming stops.'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Feanturi shouts, 'Lovely SPAM! Wonderful SPAM!'
Filbert shouts, 'Hey! Stop spamming!'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Dufus says, 'What an asshole...'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAM!'
Feanturi shouts, 'SPAMMITY SPAM!'
etc...

And LambdaMOO had a couple rooms where Monty Python characters (the Bruces and the Spam guys) performed their bits round the clock. Very hard to talk in either room, but amusing to hang out in sometimes.

Re:Not the first spam, but a new level of chatter

[Brandybuck]

Hmmm, I used to do similar stunts on AOL (just because we hated AOL so much). We would get on the Star Trek chat rooms and start spamming.

Me: "Captain, the engines are going to blow! They're full of SPAM!"
Bob: "Oh god they're back!"
Mary: "I'm outa here."
Joe: "Groan..."
Me: "Where no SPAM has gone before!"

Re:Not the first spam, but a new level of chatter

[Reziac]

And morons had been spamming and crapflooding BBSs for at least 10 years already, when these two blokes discovered scripting. The main diff being that an angry sysop can cut your access, and make it more difficult to get back on (via callback verifiers, etc.)

BTW your article link is not-responding, is it /.'d or just cranky this morning?

Spam was invented in...

[oldosadmin]

1867!!
http://www.hormel.com/brands/brandview3.asp?id=2

I like it fried on a sandwich with honey mustard.

Now we can all celebrate

[MrRuslan]

by getting a bigger penis...

Happy dupiversary!

[lightspawn]

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.

That's the Answer!!

[WinterpegCanuck]

Destroy the origional vampire and the rest will vanish!!

Re:That's the Answer!!

[JudgeFurious]

I was thinking about the Pink Eye episode of South Park with the Worcestershire Sauce zombies.

Hotline Voice: The regular sauce, the first thing you need to do is make sure that you do not just go out and start decapitating zombies left and right. Do you understand? Do not start decapitating zombies left and right!

Kyle: Uh, ok. Then what?

Hotline Voice: All you have to do is kill the original zombie. The one that started the whole mess. Once you kill the original zombie, all the others zombies will turn back to normal.

Kyle: Original zombie? Well, how the hell do we know who the original zombie is?!?

Sigh...

[Spoing]

...a crowbar, a flame thrower, and a time machine...I don't ask for much...I don't mind doing the work. In fact, it would be a pleasure.

SHHHHHHH....

[WinterpegCanuck]

. . . the VB'ers might hear you.

OMG

[re-Verse]

"Twenty years ago today, a pair of Arizona ... marketing software program that forever changed the Internet... Perl script... flooded... advertising services."

Wow what a great idea - has anyone tried it since?

Heh heh, kidding of course - Well, thinking that its only 10 years old - and hated more than a lot of diseases, hopefully there will be a cure soon enough.

There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[bigberk]

I point the finger at Microsoft, partner in crime of spam.

Why? Trust me, I know spam to the tune of 10,000 spams daily collected at my distributed spamtraps. Overwhelming, spam is arriving through Windows hosts on broadband connections. Ask any mail admin this and they'll tell you the same.

It's not because it's broadband; it's because Windows machines are so goddam easy to compromise remotely and execute code on. Just today there was a big patch released for 20 major flaws, of which 8 can lead to remote code execution. It's time we stop shrugging off as spam and realize that Microsoft is responsible for the flood of spam we get today. The flaws in their software will be exploited X days from now in the next automated worm zombie-bot.

Anti-spammers have been doing a great job putting the pressure on spam-friendly ISPs (spamhauses, etc.). We can stop those jerks from hosting spammers. But Windows users, hell, they're everywhere. So it's time Microsoft is forced to take responsibility for causing a worldwide menace with their product. It's in their power to fix (don't let them try to sell you a spam solution... hell, they created the problem).

Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[PretzelBat]

That's a great point. Did you also know that some 90-95% of all telemarketing calls are routed through the four major telephone companies?

Also, some 80% of all automobile accidents resulting in FATALITIES occur because at least one driver is using a vehicle made by one of the popular car manufacturers!!!

Believe me, this sort of problem is all over the place.

Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[lejordet]

Overwhelming, spam is arriving through Windows hosts on broadband connections. Ask any mail admin this and they'll tell you the same.

I know; couldn't even read my mail before I set up a DUN RBL - nothing is more satisfying than seeing lots of *.comcast.net-"SMTP servers" being rejected :)

Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[tehcyder]

Oh, of course! Parent is a troll, because it's an ironic response to an ill-argued and faintly ludicrous anti-MS post, and we can't have that can we?

Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[Da Fokka]

Why is parent modded a troll?! He has a point that is much more valid than the point the grandparent post is trying to make. But the grandparent-post is anti-MS and unfortunately that triggers some conditioned anti-MS-responses with some moderators.

Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[julesh]

An interesting comparison.

However, I think one difference should be pointed out - similar statistics apply in the cases you pointed out to the cases that aren't being considered (e.g. non-telemarketing calls). Whereas, if you look at non-spam e-mails only a tiny proportion are relayed through Windows machines on broadband connections.

Not to say that this implies MS is responsible for the spam problem, I blame it more on the idiotic users who will run any executable program that some jerk sends them in an e-mail.

Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[salesgeek]

Also, some 80% of all automobile accidents resulting in FATALITIES occur because at least one driver is using a vehicle made by one of the popular car manufacturers!!!

You forgot:

100% of firearms injuries are caused by guns!
-and-
90% of illegal activity is paid for with money!

I'm still laughing at your original post... funny stuff it is.

Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime

[bigberk]

Believe me, this sort of problem is all over the place.

Except telemarketing calls go over telephone trunks that behave properly (to specification and without flaws), and the car accidents also happen with cars that don't have any major flaws or design problems.

On the other hand, spam is arriving through Windows hosts compromised because they are running faulty software. There are so many bugs in the OS and 'integrated' components (IE, Outlook) that it has gotten ridiculous. The product is flawed and broken, unlike your telecom example and unlike the cars that are involved in accidents. You see how this is differenT?

Poor americans with their spam

[MavEtJu]

"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....

Take a walk down memory lane!

[jelson]

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.

Re:Take a walk down memory lane!

[Caradoc]

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."

Re:Take a walk down memory lane!

[evilviper]

My favorite:

From: ben@vgdata.demon.co.uk (Ben Last)
Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.movies

>God's Holy Spirit is gradually withdrawing its protection from the earth
>and the devastating events you see are demonstrations of Satan's power. All
>those who are not guarded by God are in danger of forever losing eternal life.

Is Arnie starring in this? Where can I rent it? :-)

Wow, prophetic! About 4-5 years before filming even started.

Re:Take a walk down memory lane!

[weave]

I still have my t-shirt! Here's a picture of it

(page safe, but rest of site not safe for work)

Wait just a second...

[shiftless]

They're spammers AND lawyers?

If there's ANY justice to be found in the universe, there's *gotta* be a special 8th circle of Hell that is reserved exclusively for these people. Let me guess, they work a weekend job as a telemarketer too?

Let's get the facts straight

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

His Website!

[david_594]

Just in case anyone wants to check it out, this is his website. http://www.l-ware.com/

Fuel for a Slashpoll

[ackthpt]

man, those people should be shot

If you met Alan Ralksy, Scott Richter, Alexey Panov, Anthony M. Banks, Chris Smith, Eddy Marin, Eric Reinersten, Juan Garavaglia or Robert Soloway on the street, you would:

Kick their balls into their shoulder blades.

Punch them in the face then kick their balls into their shoulder blades.

Punch them in the face, kick their balls into their shoulder blades and spit on them as they writhe on the ground.

Call them "motherfscking c0cksucking son of a festering whore", spit in their face, punch them in the face and kick their balls into their shoulder blades.

Flash them the "secret spammer sign" then kick them in the balls because they're competition.

Re:Fuel for a Slashpoll

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an idea.

I'm going to put an inverse auction on eBay. We'll start with $500. Everyone's bid will be deducted from that value. The winning bid will go visit Ralsky's house and cut about three feet out of his hi-speed feed.

Re:Fuel for a Slashpoll

[Tackhead]

> If you met Alan Ralksy, Scott Richter, Alexey Panov, Anthony M. Banks, Chris Smith, Eddy Marin, Eric Reinersten, Juan Garavaglia or Robert Soloway on the street, you would:
> # Kick their balls into their shoulder blades.
> # Punch them in the face then kick their balls into their shoulder blades.
> # Punch them in the face, kick their balls into their shoulder blades and spit on them as they writhe on the ground.
> # Call them "motherfscking c0cksucking son of a festering whore", spit in their face, punch them in the face and kick their balls into their shoulder blaes.
> # Flash them the "secret spammer sign" then kick them in the balls because they're competition.

ObQuirk: I call Quirk Objection, five times over.

Then again, they all sound like fun. Except for the unwarranted slur against Oedipal fellatio fetishists who happen to be descended from medically-challenged ladies of the evening. I expect you'll be getting your cease-and-desist notice from the MCSOAFWAnti-Defamation League shortly.

Twenty years ago today

[Anonymous Coward]

Twenty years ago today

Argh, is it 2014 already? That was one hell of a party!

Wow

[nasteric]

It really seems like SPAM has been around longer than 20 (or 10) years. Lets see here... thats about 600,000 SPAM emails I've deleted. Now, tally the popups I've closed. Dont forget about the pop unders. Oooh, I almost for fogot newsgroup and bulletin board SPAM. blah blah blah blah blah blah... blah blah....

I figure about 8 billion unsolicited adertisments - give or take a few hundred thousand.

Not the first...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Amazing news: Lawyers invented Perl in 1984!

[CatGrep]

Now we know the truth. A pair of Arizona Lawyers invented Perl in 1984, 3 years prior to Larry Wall's claim.

So, did Larry steal Perl or did he come up with the idea independently?

Re:Amazing news: Lawyers invented Perl in 1984!

[Idarubicin]

A pair of Arizona Lawyers invented Perl in 1984

It rather explains the syntax, doesn't it?

If they had been smarter....

[ericdano]

If they had been smarter they would have patented the process in creating spam.

New idea here?

[The Master Control P]

Has anyone considered having ISP's send out test spams to all their customers? Anyone stupid enough to respond is banned from e-mail on that ISP for a LONG time. I think even the kind of absolute moron who responds to spam would HAVE to take that kind of hint.

I'm kind of torn as to how to implement the E-Mail ban on the id10ts...

• Block ALL traffic on port 25
• Every attempted message from them bounces when it hits the ISP's E-Mail servers
• Send a technician to explain to the person what a fscking moron they are and delete any and all e-mail programs.

But really, this could work: Grab an authentic spam, have it contact you instead of the human trash who sent it. There is no possible way for spammers to avoid it: It doesn't require any cooperation from them, and the very morons who respond to spam are the ones who get eliminated. For everyone else, it's just one more spam.

What do you think? Could it possibly work, or even help?

Re:Green-Card Lotto?

[Kurt Russell]

Yep,green-card lotto spam thread.

I'm almost as bad as they are...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I'll be honest: This is my eBay auction:

Canter and Siegel's formal response to the complaint I filed with the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility

I've held this for ten years with the hope it would be valuable someday.

The original usenet post

[tintub]

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

Re: Job Security

[cbreaker]

They did it so that they could sue people for doing it later on.

Monty Python parody

[geekoid]

"Spamalot!"
"Spamalot!"
"Spamalot!"
"it's only an email.."
"SHhhhh"

Re:Monty Python parody

[rock_climbing_guy]

STOP
"Vat is your name?"
Arthur, King of the Britons.

"Vat is your quest?"
I seek the holy grail.

"When was it ten years ago that the first spam was sent?"
Nineteen eighty-four; no, nineteen ninety-naaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiii....

Just when you thought lawyers could get worse...

[Moocowsia]

I didn't know that lawyers started spam. I guess this is more evidence that lawyers are pure evil.

Re:That's not true.

[D'Sphitz]

not to mention, posting blatant spam on a message board, and even just dropping a url within normal conversation on some of the more anal ones, will get the post removed in no time in most forums that have any sort of traffic.

wrong approach

[geekoid]

Gop back, and get some of the people who were involved with its creation to convince congress to not allow advertising via the email system.
Blaming them for spam would be like blaming richtor for earth quakes. It's going to happen, it's pbvious.
Considering the way people were sreading the word about email presented it, it was bound to happen.

"It's just like mail, but you get instantly!"
Well, what is mail used for? selling things.

All you Lawyers and Spammers out there....

[gmby]

Somewhere out there is a planet for you.

Re:All you Lawyers and Spammers out there....

[AtariDatacenter]

I hope it is that planet where they measure the amount of other people's time you carelessly/needlessly wasted and extract that amount from your own lifespan. That one's my favorite.

1984?

[God! Awful 2]

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

Damn... so much for my theory that spam == newspeak!

-a

60K a day?!?

[updog]

Cohen--who says he's personally received as many as 60,000 spams in a 24-hour period--stresses that virtually no spam filter or deterrent can prevent the practice from being inherently profitable.

Does this sound like a gross exaggeration to anyone else?

This was reported on over a month ago

[GabeK]

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.

Re:This was reported on over a month ago

[GabeK]

Well, how many spam anniversaries can there be? March 5th, April 13th... What's next?

Lawsuit, anyone?

[AnomalyConcept]

Anyone want to file a class-action lawsuit against them? =P Seriously, though, it's interesting if this was the root of spam. It'd be interesting to document and trace how it spread.

The Song

[geekoid]

Happy Spamiversary!
Happy Spamiversary!
Happy Spamiversary!
Haaaaappy Spamiversary!

when mailfolder is full;
Happy Spamiversary!

when you get those virus;
Happy Spamiveeersaary!

You want to please the ladies with an extra inch or two;
Happy Spamiversary!

When you want to know what girls do on farms;
Happy Spamiversary!

Happy Spamiversary!
Happy Spamiversary!
Happy Spamiversary!
Haaaaappy Spamiversary!

Re:That's not true.

[Texas Rose on Lava L]

Actually, spamming of blogs/message boards is successfully used by spammers. The goal however is not that the spam will be seen by people reading the blog, but rather that the spammer's website will get a high ranking on google.

It works on the same principle as googlebombing (like the miserable failure thing), except you post stuff like video poker (so that, in this example, google searches for "video poker" lead to the spammer's website). It works because many bloggers use default settings for everything, which makes it easy to write a spamming script. All you need is a list of URLs of blog sites running the same blogging software.

As for the comment spam being deleted, the spammers easily fly under the radar by focusing on older stories that no one (except Google's spiders) is looking at.

One last thing, just to be clear -- the for-profit spammers aren't using the GNAA scripts. Those scripts focus on posting thousands of comments, all to the same weblog. Such a crapflood would be ignored by PageRank and therefore be useless. The for-profit spam scripts focus on posting one comment each to as many different weblogs as possible.

Your Mission

[Emperor Tiberius]

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...is to terminate this man. You will require a time portal to transport you to April 11, 1994. Should you fail, the Earth's greatest network shall fall to spammers, forever.

Good luck!

Re: Job Security

[builderbob_nz]

As funny as this may be, it does make you wonder if they knew what would happen?

Laurence Canter's Contact Info!!

[hydrostat]

Laurence Canter's new phone number (707) 280-8109 and mailing address L Ware PO Box 552 Geyserville, CA 95441 and email address lcanter@L-ware.com

Re:Laurence Canter's Contact Info!!

[hydrostat]

and now a physical address: 4035 Alexander Valley Lane Healdsburg, California 95448

Spaming the spam anniversery

[tapjpa]

Wasn't it about a month ago we heard the same shit! Well lets wait another month and we can relive the 10th anniversery of spam again. But then again if we live the anniversery over and over again isn't it just spam it's self.

Happy undecimvary and viginti sexary! (11th, 26th)

[geekotourist]

(Which sounds almost like the subject lines of recent spam I've seen... or maybe its undecimus and vicesimus sextus anniversaries as per this latin guide and now don't I wish I'd taken Latin?)

In the comments of 39 days ago, this story from a year earlier was mentioned- it celebrated the 25th anniversary of spam, and the 10th of the first description of Usenet spam as "spam." So now we're up to the 11th and 26th anniversaries!

The traditional gift for the 11th anniversary is steel (knives? axes?), and while I'm not seeing one for the 26th, I'm thinking a hand carved wooden stake would be appropriate, given just how evil spam is... assuming that current spammers even have hearts through which a stake could cure their demonic afflictions.

Proud to be from Arizona

[alphakappa]

Our humble contribution to the world.

Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[Shturmovik]

It's in his latest book, 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'. But it still embarrasses me to know that I'm a distant relative of George W. Bush, even though everybody else is too.

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[orthogonal]

Bill Bryson covered this nicely.... It's in his latest book, 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'.

That's not as much of a coincidence as it seems, because, now that you mention it, I'm related to Bill Bryson.

You see, his great-great-great-great-great....

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[meringuoid]

But it still embarrasses me to know that I'm a distant relative of George W. Bush, even though everybody else is too.

There must be something like a hundred thousand chimpanzees in the world, but I'm not ashamed to admit to being a distant relative of theirs. There's just one of them I have a problem with...

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[gujo-odori]

I don't share your opinion of Bush, but I have an embarrassment story that (to me, anyway) trumps yours: my brother's wife is a relative of Martha Stewart. That means Martha Stewart (another MS. Coincidence? I think not!) is one of my in-laws.

The horror! The horror!

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[meringuoid]

There must be something like a hundred thousand chimpanzees in the world, but I'm not ashamed to admit to being a distant relative of theirs. There's just one of them I have a problem with...

And that would be your mom?

Are you comparing my mother to George W. Bush?

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[Reziac]

I'm My Own Grandpa
( Lonzo & Oscar )

Now many, many years ago, when I was twenty-three,
I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her, and soon they, too, were wed.

This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life,
My daughter was my mother, cause she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matter, even though it brought me joy,
I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.

My little baby then became a brother-in-law to Dad,
And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad.
For if he was my uncle, then that also made him brother
Of the widow's grown-up daughter, who, of course, was my stepmother.

Father's wife then had a son who kept him on the run,
And he became my grandchild, for he was my daughter's son.
My wife is now my mother's mother, and it makes me blue,
Because, although she is my wife, she's my grandmother, too.

Now if my wife is my grandmother, then I'm her grandchild,
And everytime I think of it, it nearly drives me wild,
For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw
As husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa!

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[(C)0N0(R)]

Great! Imagine having that song stuck yr head. I knew where I could find it tho... WFMU clickable playlists! RealPlayer only :( http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/8765 (bottom of page) http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=8765&starttime=1:4 2:41

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[Reziac]

It's worse! They have "Fish Heads"!!! AAIIIEEE!!!!!

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[Reziac]

PS. Any way to get at 'em without the "required" upgrade to RealPlayer? (Mine on this machine is too old and I'm not about to upgrade the evil thing...) That site's RAM files don't have a downloadable link. :(

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[(C)0N0(R)]

Maybe try http://archive.wfmu.org:5555/archive/GK/gk030906.r m

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[Reziac]

Well, there is something there, all right (thankx!), and I can pull it across with Getright.. but it's over 20 megs!! On my connection, that's an overnighter! :(

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[(C)0N0(R)]

It is a 'kids' program, in this case by the station manager and his kid filling in for the regular hosts (who were actually in a New York Times article recently). If you know any kids (or are one yourself-aren't we all?) they would enjoy. BTW, IMHO WFMU is the finest radio station in the NYC area, and the playlists are amazing (not just for the kids show.)

Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.

[Reziac]

Ah, that explains the size -- must be a whole hour's worth. I do know someone who might want it for his kids, yeah!

Don't know WFMU, but decades ago I DJ'd for KGLT-FM, and we played... well, pretty much whatever each DJ felt like (in my case, (http://home.earthlink.net/~thesandpit/misc/dj.htm for a few samples). And we carried NPR programs, old radio, stuff like The Fourth Tower of Inverness, Chicago Symphony, weekly specials by local music historians, etc, etc.

And people wonder why we can't stand regular commercial radio :)

There is one born every minute

[klang]

There is one born every minute.. so, it's too much work to ban people because they are morons (that respond to spam). I do work at an ISP and knows that people will be on the phone for no reason at all. The money from a Moron is still money and the ISP will always take the first cut.

Another way to eliminate the spam problem would be for the ISP to protect their users against it. We do that to some extend. Unfortunately we don't make life hard for the spammers .. expotential wait after sending the first 10 copies from the same IP within a certain timeframe could be an idea .. hit the spammers where it hurts, on the time they need to use to send their trash.

Let's face it, "the little people", the morons, the large majority of internet users are customers at some ISP. Would you want to give your money to an ISP that advertices SPAM FREE mail service? I know you probably run your own mailserver on your own domain .. your choice but you have the power to block whatever you want then and spam shouldn't be a problem for you ..

Ewww!

[hayden]

The only animal that will survive a nuclear war on earth is the cockroach.

That's because it's the only animal that will stoop low enough to each the only surviving, "edible", foodstuff. Spam.

It was sent in March not April!

[Albanach]

To make it worse, the date isn't even correct. The spam was sent on 5th March according to archive.org and a quick check at google groups finds references even older than that.

Seems they just picked a date so they could say today is the tenth aniversary.

Explanation

[Viceice]

Someone else once posted on SlashDot:

Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this;
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh;
Stop, traveler, and piss.

-- Lord Byron, on Lord Castlereagh

I think the parent was posting in relation to that post.

Re:Explanation

[AndroidCat]

I doubt even Lord Byron invented the idea. It seems to be something universal in the human spirit. He just said it so cultural. :^)

It is 20 years

[Trailwalker]

Apparently, people here are unfamiliar with how lawyers calculate billable hours.

AOL's is also spam's partner in crime

[Gary Destruction]

Just look at all those cd's they send out. So a spammer gets his account yanked from one ISP. He just pops in an AOL CD and does it all over again.

That's not it...

[Kjella]

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

Interview with Lawrence Canter

[frozenray]

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.
-----

Oblig. Rush quote

[JoeBaldwin]

Imagine a man
Where the spam began
Some lawyers in the USA
Scripting evil Perl scripts
On that April day
All the inboxes that be
And your browser history
Would be clogged for ever mooooooore...

This just in: Spam has multiple anniversaries!

[Goobermunch]

Didn't we see this a month ago?

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/05/1602 29 &mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126

--AC

This was not spam!

[rduke15]

Well, at least not by spamassassin's standard: it only scores 1.1 of 5 required points, but I still have to edit it somehow, because the "lameness filter" says "Please use fewer 'junk' characters.":

$ cat canter.txt | spamassassin
From: nike@indirect.com (Laurence Canter)
Newsgroups: alt.shenanigans
Subject: Green Card Lottery- Final One?
Date: 12 Apr 1994 08:44:36 GMT
Organization: Canter & Siegel
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <2odn1k$674@herald.indirect.com>
NNTP-Posting-Hos t: id1.indirect.com
X-Spam-Flag: NO (1.1/5.0). FOR_FREE=0.694,LINES_OF_YELLING=0.011,
LINES_OF_YELLING_2=0.105,UPPERCASE_25_50=0.261
X- Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.61-xxx_04031502
(1.212.2.1-2003-12-09-exp) on xxx
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=1.1 required=5.0 tests=FOR_FREE,LINES_OF_YELLING,
LINES_OF_YELLING_2,UPPERCASE_25_50 autolearn=no
version=2.61-xxx_04031502
X-Spam-Level: *

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

--

Canter & Siegel, Immigration Attorneys
3333 E Camelback Road, Ste 250, Phoenix AZ 85018 USA
cslaw@indirect.com telephone (602)661-3911 Fax (602) 451-7617

Re: Job Security

[kuma_act]

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.

just goes to show you...

[Jagaast]

it's always the lawyers' fault!

Did the term "spam"

[rdsmith4]

actually come from MOnty python?

This is the skit in question:

Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;

Vikings: Spam spam spam spam...

Waitress: ...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam...

Vikings: Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!

Waitress: ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.

(et cetera)...see the full script or the sound file.

wasn't the first spam sent out in 1978?

[neckdeepinspecialsau]

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

Yet another correction

[WebGangsta]

For those of you paying attention (hey, Brad!), the date that this article was posted (the 14th) is NOT the anniversary day, at least not according to the various 'spam history' articles online.

"Ten years ago today..." should have read "Ten years ago on April 12th"

(or 20 years, or 15 years, or whatever the number of years is that the rest of you were discussing)

So in order to celebrate...

[jbarr]

...send a copy of the news article to ten of your friends and...

The message

[Kj0n]

Click here

everybody or nobody is your descendent

[peter303]

A note in American Scientist a few months back calculated that your genes either propagate to almost everybody in a country-size region in 30-40 generations (750-1000 years) or completely die out. So almost everybody is related to early British royalty.

The only scientific verification I've seen of this is called the Ghengis Khan y-chomosome found in 8 percent of male Asians. This presumes all-male descent. So when counting mixed male-female descent, the population fraction is much higher. Being 30-some generations back, most Asians may have Genghis Khan genes, but only a fraction of a percent.

Got to get to work in spreading my genes :-)

sue them for their direct liability

[pensivemusic]

in a class action suit.

And to top it off C&S wrote a BOOK about it

[Stavr0]

How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway

The main spam run was April 12

[frankie]

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.

Re:The main spam run was April 12

[Pope]

who else here remembers exactly where you were (and what you felt) when you saw Green Card Lottery in every newsgroup?

I was in my university's design lab, working to finish an art project, and taking a bit of a break to read some Mac-related Usenet stuff, when all of sudden I see this Green Card post. I couldn't figure out why the heck it was here, then found it cross-posted in all 6 of my regular groups. Having only been on the net all of 6 months, I didn't "get" what was happening.

Back in those wonderful days, when I could use my real email address everywhere, and emailing someone out of the was to be expected. :)

Re:The main spam run was April 12

[Maserati]

In my dorm room about 10 seconds away from a quick WHOIS lookup and a phone call. C&S' ISP was fairly nonchalant about their phone ringing off the hook. Nonchalant in the 'oh hi, yes you aren't the only pissed off Usenetter we've talked to today' sense not the 'so what ?' sense.

Re:The main spam run was April 12

[buckthorn]

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.

Why am I not surprised

[JohnnyGTO]

that this is the work of American laywers? Must have been transplants to Arizona, no way would a real AZ do this, unless he was a lawyer.

OT: hiring processes

[bug-eyed monster]

In case you're asking for real... When a company wants to use a new technology, they usually get existing employees to train and learn it. These are usually people who are known to be good learners, good workers or, ahem, have some other good attributes.

The question of previous experience is only raised when hiring for a specific position, and that's because the new hire is somewhat of an unknown quantity: you don't know how good they are at picking up new tech. You can also get hired through other channels (job fairs, etc) for no specific skills or positions, luck out and get assigned to learn the new tech as soon as you start.

All this to say, the "require someone with 10 years of experience" is just one way among many that companies use to find and place people in their projects.

Re:OT: hiring processes

[OwlWhacker]

In case you're asking for real...

I wasn't. Honest!

My point is really: If they want to hire somebody clued up, you'd think that at least the people doing the hiring would have a clue themselves!

Proof...

[Loopy]

...that PERL, not Windows, is the root of all evil. /ducks the flying pans.

Re:That's not true.

[87C751]

As for the comment spam being deleted, the spammers easily fly under the radar by focusing on older stories that no one (except Google's spiders) is looking at.

Except that modern blogging software notifies the admin when new comments are posted, so we can not only delete the crap as soon as it hits, we can also practice our SQL.

UPDATE posts SET comment_status = 'closed' WHERE (today - post_date > (7*day));

Figures

[g0bshiTe]

Ten years ago today, a pair of Arizona attorneys

It was lawyers that started it.

Re:That's not true. Neither is that.

[i_am_pi]

Except that most modern bloggers only understand that they had to pay more money for the "ess cue ell" service on their web hosting account.

Re: Job Security

[Registered Coward v2]

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

There spam, aka the Green Card Spam, was aimed at people wanting to immigrate to the US and offered to help people improve their chances at getting a card in the lottery that the US was holding for green cards. I'm not sure how the laws work, but they were practicing law at the federal, not state level.

People dug up a lot of info on them and generally tried to make their life miserable, Cantor would answer emails. Joel Furr, IIR, made t-shirts advertising their spam and was threatened with a lawsuit. Eventually the furor died off, replaced by the Spam King and others.

They used their real email address (since they needed responses), wrote a book on who to spam, and tehn dropped out of siight. Cantor, IIR, no works in the computer industry and Siegal died a while back.

Hmm, I know where all the letters are coming from.

[atheken]

They must also be the lawyers sending all those nasty C&D's!

From the CNet article...

[Jswalden86]

"What if the company that produces Viagra ever wanted to send out an e-mail?" Spira mused. "The value of that mark in that context has been utterly diminished."

With Viagra losing its trademark potency...

If anyone's still moderating this discussion, I think it's worth noting the writer's mistake...that last bit should have been:

With Viagra becoming impotent

*duck*