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Happy Spamiversary!
Shippy writes "Ten years ago today, a pair of Arizona attorneys launched a homemade marketing software program that forever changed the Internet. It was the birth of spam. They did this by whipping up a Perl script that flooded message boards advertising their legal services." Update: 04/14 05:26 GMT by S : That'd be ten years ago, not twenty.
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
The article actually reads 1994, not 1984, after all perl wasn't released until 1987
Twenty years ago? Where the hell have I been for the last ten years?
April 12, 1994
math is so hard
the first spam was a guy who spammed on arpanet for high end computer systems. Am I crazy?
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.
that we should blame perl for all our spam?
Karma: Negative (Mostly affected by dorm trolling)
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.
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.
-This sig has been discontinued after a sudden realization.
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
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Well, you know what they say about lawyers...
It's only 99% of them that give the 1% a bad name.
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
The Canter and Siegel spam was not the first spam, nor the first commercial abuse, nor the first to be called a spam. (The term SPAM had been used to describe flooding on MUDS since the early 90s, and had been applied to USENET floods about a year before.)
The C&S spam had two firsts to it. One, they were the first to not turn tail and run after seeing the anger of the net. Prior spammers had quickly given up. C&S fought back.
That leads to first #2, they caused a lot of conversation and awareness, and that led to the term going mainstream, away from just lesser use in newsgroups and MUDS.
A while ago I wrote a history of the term spam and the early spam events. You may find it useful in tracing the history of this and other events.
Two of the big anniversaries were about a year ago. The 25th anniversary of the first E-mail spam I found, and the 10th anniversary of the term SPAM being used to describe a USENET flooding.
The first really big USENET spam was january of 94, it was religious. A big commercial spam dates back to the 80s, and jj@cup.portal.com.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Destroy the origional vampire and the rest will vanish!!
...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.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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).
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.
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?
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
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?
For those who are interested: The first use of 'spam' for spam
sig under construction...
They did it so that they could sue people for doing it later on.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Check this out. It was already reported on. The first Canter & Siegel spam was sent out on March 5th, 1994. You can see that in the article and on Wikipedia.
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
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....
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Seems they just picked a date so they could say today is the tenth aniversary.
Here
Quoting from it:
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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.
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"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
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.
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
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