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Spam Is 30 Years Old
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."
In the spirit of the history of Spam, I think it also bears mentioning something I didn't see in the article: a Usenet phrase "Eternal September" which was September of 1993. An exponential growth of spam and gullible users ensured constant income for spammers and provided the initial hit of income for people like The Spam King (I won't even dignify him with printing his name). They've been chasing the dragon ever since at the expense of the hardware and software of the internet. And to think that if the spammers had missed that initial exposure of thousands of people willing to "increase what she prefers your size XXL no one will know you use works 100%" then we might not be in the situation we are today.
Judges today should force spammers to work with law enforcement and security companies to figure out how to stop others before they even start. If not for an initial hit of funding, I doubt any spammer would continue.
My work here is dung.
It was sometime in the early 1990s when some lawyers posted a message to every usenet newsgroup advertising a greencard service. I dont think they did it by hand, but automated script.
Usenet hasnt fared too well lately. Soem Chinese guy piosts tens of thousands of messages a day trying to sell direct factory output. Changes the posting address in every messsage so normal filters have problems.
I think the younger crowd has long moved over to special interest groups on social netowrking sites.
RMS truly is a visionary.
IN ENFORCEMENT OF THIS POLICY DCA IS DEPENDENT ON THE ARPANET SPONSORS, AND HOST AND TIP LIAISONS. IT IS IMPERATIVE YOU INFORM YOUR USERS AND CONTRACTORS WHO ARE PROVIDED ARPANET ACCESS THE MEANING OF THIS POLICY.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.
MAJOR RAYMOND CZAHOR
CHIEF, ARPANET MANAGEMENT BRANCH, DCA Did Major Czahor have a 6-bit terminal, or was he just indulging in the traditional military fondness for capital letters? But what's really funny is that he doesn't care about the spamming as such, he just wants to remind everybody that the network was for "U.S. Government Business Only". Which is laughable, since unofficial use of ARPANET was rampant, especially in 1978. That's how Zork got developed, with its authors writing it in pieces and using feedback from the ARPANET community to improve the game. There was also an excellent database of limericks; a friend with ARPANET access was good enough to print it out for me, but I've long since lost it. Anybody seen it online? For that matter, is there a PDP-10 emulator somewhere running the original Zork? Not the Fortran port (which never had the complete game) the original MDL version.
Oh come on, the only people on the ARPAnet back in 1978 were the nerdiest of the nerds. What were they going to do, throw their pocket protectors at the guy?
For reference, the people complaining about the spam on that page are her, him, and also this guy
I'm sure the DEC guy was quaking in his boots.
PS. to the slashscript: that's a quote, stupid, it's not "yelling", dumb idiot, it's 1978. Everybody was "YELLING" at that time.
PPS. Sorry, guys, just skip this part. This is for the noble sake of quoting the original content IN ORIGINAL FORM.
History
"Idiot" was originally created to refer to "layman, person lacking professional skill", "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning".[6][7] Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state), such as the Athenian democracy, was considered dishonorable. "Idiots" were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters. Over time, the term "idiot" shifted away from its original connotation of selfishness and came to refer to individuals with overall bad judgment-individuals who are "stupid". In modern English usage, the terms "idiot" and "idiocy" describe an extreme folly or stupidity, its symptoms (foolish or stupid utterance or deed). In psychology, it is a historical term for the state or condition now called profound mental retardation.[8]
Disability
In 19th and early 20th century medicine and psychology, an "idiot" was a person with a very severe mental retardation or a very low IQ level, as a sufferer of cretinism, defining idiots as people whose IQ were below 20 (with a standard deviation of 16);
In current medical classification, these people are now said to have profound mental retardation, and the word "idiot" is no longer used as a scientific term.
United States law
The California Penal Code Section 26 states that "Idiots" are one of six types of people who are not capable of committing crimes.[9]
In several states, "idiots" do not have the right to vote:
* Arkansas Article III, Section 5[10]
* Iowa Article II, section 5[11]
* Kentucky Section 145[12]
* Mississippi Article 12, Section 241[13]
* New Jersey (Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 6)[14]
A resolution was passed by the State Legislature in January 2007 to remove "idiot or insane", and to add the qualifying phrase "who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting." As the resolution put it succintly, "This proposed amendment to the Constitution shall be submitted to the people at the next general election occurring more than three months after the final agreement. This constitutional amendment shall become part of the New Jersey Constitution upon approval by the voters." [15] The amendment passed the referendum on November 6, 2007. Hence, "New Jersey" is now crossed out in this list. [16]
* New Mexico Article VII, section 1[17]
* Ohio (Article V, Section 6)[18]
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use of the word "spam" to describe unwanted electronic correspondence.
See http://tinyurl.com/4jg5w4 (the url is a tinyurl that links to a google groups posting)
And yes, I'm the one who said that back then, and no, I didn't think I was doing anything big, it just seemed, well, obvious at the time.
Paul Czarnecki Cezanne
And now, for the win: The amount of harm done by any of the cited "unfair" things the net has been used for is clearly very small.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
TFA is about the first unsolicited commercial email. That became the definition of email that came to be called "spam" well after the first reference to the Monty Python sketch, which was brought up to describe massively multiple posts of advertising to usenet. It says at http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html that Joel Furr was first to call it spam, but I seem to remember someone else stating that it reminded them of "a Monty Python sketch -- spam, spam, spam, spam."
BTW, the Hormel people never had a problem with the use of the term. In part because it was free PR, but also because they were gracious good humored about it. They went as far as to offer their own selected graphic of a spam can that could be used as a link to their pages. The idea as floated to them was to have their permission to produce a 2-link bar that said "This is Spam" [Hormel link] "and this is spam" [link to page with definition of problematic usenet and email traffic]. I can confidently state their being gracious and good natured because I was the one that suggested the links idea to them, requested the graphic of their choice, and talked with them about their reactions to use of the term. In this respect, the second of the "Cultural References" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(Monty_Python) is incorrect, though the History section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) gets it right.
They later reacted a little differently when people insisted on using the capitalized name in their own software and anti-spam sites (such as Spam Arrest) and couldn't see their way clear to use the more generic, lower case term. People criticized them for doing so without bothering to consider that they were forced by trademark law to protect their mark (the capitalized word) no matter how much they disliked doing so, lest they lose trademark status. Sadly, few seem to remember that Hormel asked nicely at first that the lower case be used unless referring to their product. The assertion by Spam Arrest that "No company can claim trademark rights on a generic term" is wrong: a term when trademarked before it comes into common use (trademark status being awarded 40 years prior to this "common use") remains a trademark as long as the owner acts to (at least attempt to) prevent its use as a generic term. Such action kept "xerox" and "kleenex" from becoming an accepted generic terms for photocopying and facial tissue, while failure to do so allowed "aspirin" and "heroin" to become generic terms despite starting as brand names, both originally owned by Bayer AG. As a German company it was unable to protect the marks against generic use in the US, particularly during WW II. Although Hormel lost the court cases that resulted, they acted with a "reasonable attempt" to protect the ownership of the mark, and so didn't lose it.
BTW, TFA is not a novel article. CNET published one on its 25th anniversary in 2003. In that respect, TFA is repeated public posting of commercial (or at least commercially supported) information. TFA fits the original definition of spam. In any case, New Scientist loses points for copying the idea for the article.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B