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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. ;)"
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I'd kill him if he weren't already dead.
In terms of Internet spamming - it's closer to 26 years old - link.
I can't see anything about Cunard from the submitter's link.
But, surprisingly, the first spam wasn't sent via e-mail
Shouldn't that be "But, unsurprisingly, the first spam wasn't sent via e-mail".
It would be really a surprise if they sent spam by email 100 years ago. Don't you think?!
Free XBox, PS2
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.
I have the kind of love for spammers that makes me want to light them on fire and throw them down a flight of stairs. That's love baby.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
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. Spam is increasing, not decreasing, and it is most certainly doing so with or faster than the pace of technology. We really need to find some solutions to this problem before spam becomes so widespread that the only way to fight it is to increast bandwith. (I don't mean just email spam, I mean popups and flash banners and such. The bandwith they take up must be massive, I'm amazed that the internet still functions with all the waste)
Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
There are really two kinds of person-to-person communication medium...
- An open network, where anybody can send to anybody... and that means you can get messages from people you never heard of, for better or worse. Lowlife types are allowed to thrive and spam away.
- A closed network where in order to stay in the club, you've gotta play by the rules. Lowlifes are bounced out on their first offenses. This keeps the trouble away, but it also limits the number of people who can reach you over that channel.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
We need to get tough with them.
Charge them, arrest them.
This is a good start
Of course this was not just spammers but they are all as bad as each other if you ask me.
Games Programmer And Designer
Google says:
;P
Spam: Unsolicited "junk" e-mail sent to large numbers of people to promote products or services.
Note the e- in front of "mail" in the defintion. If it ain't e-mail, then it's just plain old junk mail.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Or not. What they did was more akin to direct-mailing (or perhaps even more specific than that). They had a target audience, and by being limited by cost, they could only send to the select of that target audience. Now, Spam is essentially free. In fact, there is no "target audience" per se; the demographics of those who reply to spam is representative of much more diversity than those who Cunard targeted.
The Spam in my cupboard is only 50 years old, so I guess I am doing well...
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?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The first unwanted advertisements were probably scrawled on cave walls and advertised "Atok's fine-carved spears, extra cheap! Kill many deer and bison!!!!!" a few hundred-thousand years ago, if we're going to get all technical about it.
1) Ebola research
2) Cost effective replacements for crash test dummies.
3) Cost effective replacements for animals in cosmetic testing.
4) Cost effective replacement for ballistics gel.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
How can I ever repay them for the huge gigantic penis I now have? The girls love it!
Of course dollar for dollar the first spam sent was quite a lot cheaper. But when you account for inflation and the reduction in volume per can (from roughly 0.00084 Volkswagens to roughly 2 iPods) the price is actually $0.40USD/Can more expensive
Don't believe me? Check my references.
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.
For all we know, illicit advertising could have started even back in as far as the caveman days...
There was once a caveman named Ug who would hurl rocks from far away at unsuspecting dwellers. Each rock would have a pictures etched into it depicting a caveman holding a shield to protect himself from flying rocks. One day, Ug threw a rock from far away at another caveman, Og, with the usual picture etched into the rock. Hit and startled by the incomming rock, Og picked it up, gazed at the picture, scratched his head, and looked at Ug. Ug threw another rock, which this time hit Og right on the head. Angry, Og threw the rock back at Ug, only to see Ug hold up a shield and deflect the rock.
Og was very impressed. He and his tribe of other cavemen then walked over to Ug. Ug held up a picture showing himself handing another caveman the shield, and the other caveman handing him lots of furs. Og smiled, took the shield, and hit Ug over the head with his club, killing him. So Og and his tribe feasted on Ug, striking fear into the hearts of marketers who were not strong enough to defend themselves against a bunch of angry cavemen. Such a utopia prospered for generations, until the invention of the telephone.
From Wikipidia: "In this article and those related, the term spamming is used broadly to refer to all of these behaviors, regardless of medium and commercial intent."
Notice the regardless of medium.Personally, I consider spam to be the automatic supply of unwanted information. For that reason I wouldn't consider mailing lists and telemarketers as spammers. You signed up for the mailing list and telemarketing is not an automatic process. Besides, telemarketing provides (provided) a lot of people with jobs (even if bad jobs, some people need the money more than the good job).
For instance: You can be spammed with junk mail. A channel can be spammed by bots. You can be spammed with emails. You can't be spammed over the phone unless a recording is calling you. You can be spammed in the grocery store (oh wait, that's different...)
Of course, this is just my personal way of looking at it, so what do I know?o--o o -o oo ooo / o -o o-oo o- o-o --o o -- o -o - / o--o oo o-oo o-oo ooo
The link in the story has nothing to do with the text used.. there's nothing on that page about spam being 100 years old. Worse, it's a link to an other useful resource which could do without being hammered by tens of thousands of Slashdot readers. Remember the recent stories about Wikipedia being overloaded on Slashdot recently?
Without an article to substantiate the claim, maybe mkavanagh2 simply sent a fake story to win a bet.
One thing I rarely see mentioned is that spam is mostly micrososft's fault.
What a pile of crap. While I am no MS supporter blaming Microsoft is pure and simply wrong.
Blame the people DOING the spamming, blame the people who don't keep up to date with the latest patches (which will dramatically reduce the chance of your box becoming owned).
While you at it blame the people trying to own the box.
Those are owned because Billy and the Boys from Redmond simply have no idea how to build an operating system
Bzzzt. Wrong. See above. (This from a linux advocate).
Games Programmer And Designer
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.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I'd say that we should repay them with SPAM.
That's right... a vigilante "SPAM squad" manning a truck carrying dozens of tons of SPAM, along with a delivery system not unlike a tree chipper that can accept SPAM by the ton and spray greasy SPAM puree hundreds of feet.
The SPAM squad would pull up to the houses of known spammers and douse the house, car, grounds, mailbox, and anything else in sight in 6-12 inches of greasy salted pork goo that would take years to clean up. If the weight of the flying SPAM puree hitting their front windows just "happend" to break them and fill their living room with chunks of SPAM as well, by "accident," that would just be too bad.
Say, 50-60 tons of SPAM per spammer in flash vigilante "actions" out to keep each of them busy for a few weeks (months? years?) at least trying to clean up their persons, personal effects, and lives and drive the smell (and flies) away. Just spray-and-go and let them come stumbling out, slipping and sliding and cursing, realizing that they have finally gotten their comeuppance.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
....Spammers would be caught, jailed and made to share their cell with people who have enlarged their penis, taken viagra and are looking for a new relationship :^).
-Dracken
It would have been Spam if the Cunard line had sent the telegrams collect!
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
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processing Quote: Originally Posted by excelbru
Can someone advise me a reliable bulk proof credit card processor not shutting me down after the first complaints?
...
We can do such processing for you. Take a look at our site www.oxbill.com
And much, much more.
If you deal with spam, it's worth some time spent visiting that site. There's a whole criminal infrastructure to support spamming. You'll find "bullet proof web hosting", domain laundering, credit card laundering, virus/worm distributors selling access to zombie machines, mortgage lead buyers, and "pharmacy" operators.
Yes, it's been reported to CERT/Homeland Security and NANAE.
It is hypothesized that certain neanderthal societies used to write inscriptions on large rocks before hurling them ferociously at passers by.
Coincidently enough, this has significant commonalities with one of todays more successful spam counter measures, which involves incribing "stop sending me spam" on similarly large rocks and hurling them ferociously at spammers.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
I would assume that even such early spam was soon frowned upon. In its infancy unsolicited communicaiton was probably novel but it wouldn't take long to become the burden it is today. But because it has remained a burden for so long proves its success.
It is no more ingenious than a brute force attack. However, wherever else brute force fails it succeeds in the marketplace. If we tighten our email schemes, turn off pop-ups in our browsers and so on it stands to reason that spam will simply evolve, not die out. It has survived the shift from telegrams to email and all steps in between, it will likely not be quenched by anything less than a superior competitor: something that provides the same service - pairing potential buyers with sellers of questionable goods - yet isn't a burden to anyone who isn't interested.
Much like factoring prime numbers and brute forcing encryption it may well be impossible to replace spam with something "better". But if it will be stopped that's the only way.
So their punishment would include 42 meters of penis enlargement theropy, several hundered skanky Russian mail order brides and a heavy overdose of viagra and vicadin? Interesting punishment ;)
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Everyone knows the first spam was 6,341 years ago when the serpent offered Eve an herbal remedy to not only give Adam more staying power, but add cubits to his manhood. Turns out it was just an apple, and Adam & Eve got blamed for the whole scam and banned by their ISP.
--- Ban humanity.
my wife replied, 'it tastes like it too'
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Nope. Not Even Close.
Postal "spam" has existed since the
post office was first founded. In
the 19th Century, the typical
addressee would be:
The Best Farmer In
Smallville, Missouri
or
Progressive Businessman In
Littletown, Iowa
The worst was before stamps,
when all letters were
sent collect. If someone was dumb
enough to claim one of these, they
paid the postage!
Hmmm, kinda familiar.....
The Lusitania sinking in 1915 had nothing to do with the US' declaration of war in 1917.
That had more to do with the Zimmermann note promising Mexico territorial adjustments in exchange for a declaration of war against the US, as well as sinkings of US flag merchant vessels in the North Atlantic.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.