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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
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.
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.
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. -
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?
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.