Spam Turns 100, By One Reckoning

mkavanagh2 writes "Spam is 100 years old today! But, surprisingly, the first spam wasn't sent via e-mail. In fact, 100 years ago, Cunard sent out telegrams to selected (rich) members of the British social elite, advertising tickets on a new liner, and becoming the first spammer. Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers who followed for the 100 years of 'joy' they have given us. ;)"

Comments

Re:Spam - More than a nuisance

[ryanw]

We joke and complain about spam, but personally I am wondering how much the internet can take before things just start to slow down drastically.

I would imagine the traffic of porn and usenet far outweigh spam and is also increasing at an exponential rate.

Well, to put a finer point on it...

[Sheetrock]

Most people consider spam as unsolicited commercial e-mail and have it in a separate class entirely from junkmail or telemarketing because it puts a heavier burden on the receiver than on the sender.

There are signs that this is changing however, with fewer mailservers handling e-mail, better bandwidth, and larger hard disk sizes it is quite likely that we are approaching a point at which spam begins to achieve parity with junkmail in terms of that sender/receiver cost relationship. At which point it may be wise to at least consider including spam as a marketing resource alongside more conventional services.

Junkmail keeps the cost of stamps low and helps subsidize other uses of the postal system. Perhaps if the same occurs with spam it won't be such an ugly concept?

Where's TFA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Without an article to substantiate the claim, maybe mkavanagh2 simply sent a fake story to win a bet.

Careful - Collateral Damage

[ozmanjusri]

Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers

While I agree with all the disgust the community has against spammers, please try to control your responses.
As a recurrent victim of "Joe Jobs" where a spammer forges my domain name in the Reply-To field of their junk, I'm already having to deal with thousands of bounced messages (currently about 120/minute) as well as the attacks of well-meaning but misguided people on my website.

I'm not sure what I've done to attract the attention of the spammer, but at the moment it looks like they'll succeed in putting me out of business - I can't use email while this is happening, since any filtering which brings the traffic down to a managable level also drops real messages.

Re:Well, not nitpicking

[bburton]

I always thought SPAM came in a can...

Remember:

• When somebody talked about SPAM, they meant the food.
• When a Mouse was a little furry rodent
• When Hardware meant hammers, nails, etc.
• When RAM meant to butt into something.
• When Monitor meant to watch someone closely.
• When Desktops were made out of mahogany.
• When Wallpaper went on walls.
• When Icons where people you looked up to.
• When Pointers were a dog breed.
• When Buttons went on your shirt.
• When a Register was something a store kept money in.
• When a BUG meant an insect.

Ahh the days...

Re:Cheap fun

[plover]

No, very few idiots actually buy from spammers.

Mostly, the idiots are the vendors who hire the spammers. They buy the spamming service for $60.00 for 10000 emails. The spammers invest $200 in "fake" purchases from the vendor. The vendor is so excited he forks over $1000 for 200,000 emails. The spammer sends them out, and pockets the $860, not caring if the vendor makes another sale or not. If he thinks the fish is really gullible, he might string him along with another investment of $100-200, in hopes of landing another $2000 or so.

Spammers are thieves, they lie, cheat and hack their way into our inboxes. What makes you think they treat their paying customers any better?

Re:Cheap fun

[plover]

No, even enforcing fully traceable spam and passing draconian laws won't stop it.

Most spam today comes from zombie PCs, not from giant spam servers. Spammers have hackers infest thousands of PCs with worms, and use those to spew forth their vendors' get rich quick schemes.

OK, you made spam traceable. So now what? Are the feds going to bust in on Aunt Millie just because she didn't install Service Pack 2, hot fix KB123456789, and so allowed spammers to use her name to send their crap?

It might mean Comcast shuts down Aunt Millie's PC from sending email. Or not -- maybe the zombie operator uses Aunt Millie's PC to generate a new Hotmail or gmail account, and sends forth the bilge from there? Extra steps that get Aunt Millie in hotter water, but do nothing to the spammers or their hacking minions.

Technological answers only stop them one zombie at a time. Sure, you can disinfect Aunt Millie's box, but by the time it's patched, both Uncle Fred and Grandma Anna's PCs have been wormed. Spam laws be damned, you're not going to be a popular government for jailing Millie, Fred and Anna for what amounts to a "failure to understand and apply Windows XP Service Pack 2's cumulative security patch for the week ending 9/18."

It's like any other crypto or security problem. Security is a perimeter defense, and it will always be attacked at the weakest point. Cryptologically hardened email will simply mean we spend more CPU cycles verifying that this spam did indeed come from Aunt Millie. ( And, the converse should indicate that the spammers have a weak point too -- I believe it's somewhere south of their pelvises, and north of their thighs. Apply the appropriate amount of pressure and see how much spam shows up tomorrow ... :-)

Ah, the mandatory crackpot conspiracy theory, eh?

[Moraelin]

Let me tell you a little secret: I actually was on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, in the bad old days of the Cold War. It also happens that several family friends were doctors.

Guess what? If such wonder drugs ever existed, the soviets (and the whole soviet block) didn't use them either. Wonder why. Maybe because such wonder drugs only ever existed in crackpot conspiracy theories, but never In Real Life?

And don't tell me it was also the "evil" westen pharma corporations who were stopping the Soviets from using their own medicine. (I don't remember the West stoping the Soviets from building nukes or breeding hot strains of smallpox, for example.)

I'll tell you something funny: the whole Eastern European block had a very liberal policy when it came to antibiotics. And plenty of corruption. One way or the other, you could get pretty much any medicine you bloody pleased, whether you actually needed it or not. (Or whether it could even work at all for your disease or not.) Kids were routinely stuffed full of antibiotics and sulphamids at the slightest sign of a cold.

Yet noone ever got such a miracle cure. Even there, when you did get prescribed medicine, it was 3-4 times a day, for a week or more. Just like in the West. Go figure.

And if you needed an operation, they didn't just sprinkle some magic potion. They used sterilized equipment and aseptic rooms, just like in the West. Go figure.

So please spare me the bullshit conspiracy theories.

There is no magic wand that you can just wave and make the illness go away. There never was, never will be. Not on the Western side, not on the Soviet side, and not in China either.

And if there was one, those same pharma companies could patent it and have a monopoly on magic wands for 20 years straight. The one who had a magic wand that cures, say, diabetes, could sell it for a fortune per milligram, and make one helluva lot more profit from that than from being the 100'th guy selling cheap generic insulin.

Plus if there was one, what do you thing would happen the first time a pharma executive, or doctor or pharmacist got a fatal disease? Do you expect me to believe they'd just patiently await their own death, rather than threaten their profits? Better yet, that millions of doctors and pharmacists _all_ keep the secret rather than save their own lives or the lives of their children.

Dude, there is no amount of money in the world that could buy that.