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Spam Is 30 Years Old

Posted by kdawson on from the happy-birthday-now-die-already dept.

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist commemorates spam's 30th anniversary, a week from today. The first spam message — archived here — was sent to 393 users of ARPANET on May 2, 1978 by someone from computing pioneers DEC. They had to type in all the addresses by hand first."

7 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Stallman --- by mingot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Heh, nice pro spam message by RMS there.

    1. Re:Stallman --- by eln · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, but he still has the same issue with it that countless Usenet posters have had about spam for years: stop making me page through 10 pages of headers just to read your garbage.

      It's interesting to note that he was in favor of advertising (dating sites especially!) so long as he didn't have to page through a bunch of headers to read the ad.

  2. The more things change, the more they stay the sam by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I love the fact that the message starts with a buffer overflow.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  3. 30 Years On... by Pete+Slash+Work · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And RMS is STILL a whinging windbag.... Some things never change!

  4. Re:usenet spam - greencard lawyers by Neil · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Canter and Siegel. I still remember firing up trn that morning, coming across the same off-topic message in group after group, and realizing that someone had used a newsgroups list in conjunction with a perl script or something to post the same advert to every USENET group in existence.

    The mechanism was obvious as soon as you saw the results, but it seemed so obviously wrong and inappropriate "why would anyone *do* that!". The beginning of the end of the golden age ...

  5. Not much has changed by Noexit · · Score: 3, Insightful

    30 years later one crap message to a list can still generate dozens of messages bitching about the extra traffic and waste of resources.

    --

    Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo

  6. They called out some major industries by lbgator · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's kind of neat to read TFA - they mentioned many things which ARPAnet wasn't intended for but would eventually become profit centers on the internet: dating services, job finding services, advertising, and general announcements (births in this instance). In this one discussion of what the network should and shouldn't be for they called out some of the major industries to come.