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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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/ .

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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?

[MoFoQ]

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

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...

[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...

[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

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".

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...

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.

Heh

[ObviousGuy]

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

Maybe not so ironic?

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.

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 :-))

Time to be festive!

[pararox]

So where is the festival to be?

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...

[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...

[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.

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

[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!"

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!!

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.

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

[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."

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?

His Website!

[david_594]

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

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?

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"

All you Lawyers and Spammers out there....

[gmby]

Somewhere out there is a planet for you.

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: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.

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

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.

[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!

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.

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.
-----

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.

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

The message

[Kj0n]

Click here

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

[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.