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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.
Heh, nice pro spam message by RMS there.
This is the first time I've purposely clicked a link to view spam.
"APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN."
So, uhm, they failed?
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
I half-expected to see a message more along the lines of, "Xp4nd y0ur R4m, d3creeese ur l4tency".
Thanks for making people focus less on sending me physical junk mail. The development of a spam filter which automatically rubs it in feces and sends it back to the originator wasn't going so well. The robots were the hard part. Stupid robots.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
that we can't get today's spammers to manually type in every address too. That might cut down on spam a bit.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
For those wondering, the original spam (nee Hormel spiced ham) turned 70 last year.
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.
It looks like RMS was looking for love back then too!
10-MAY-78 23:20:30-PDT,2250;000000000001
Mail-from: MIT-AI rcvd at 7-MAY-78 2316-PDT
Date: 8 MAY 1978 0213-EDT
From: RMS at MIT-AI (Richard M. Stallman)
Subject: MSGGROUP# 697 Some Thoughts about advertising
To: stefferud at USC-ISI
Redistributed-To: [ISI]<MsgGroup>Mailing.List;154:
Redistributed-By: STEFFERUD (connected to MSGGROUP)
Redistributed-Date: 8 MAY 1978
---EDIT--
4) Would a dating service for people on the net be "frowned upon" by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. But I didn't dive up! Thus, I have figured out a way to beat the system, here it goes:
while echo "SPAM!"; do echo "SPAM!"; done
So for much for a SPAM filter, slashdot!
The script was written in perl, of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canter_&_Siegel
The article has notes about their numerous ethical lapses also.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Damn AC, you beat me to it. That comment alone made the whole thing worth reading. I was reading along, not really paying attention to who was who, but I got to that line and thought, 'okay, who is THIS yutz?' So I scrolled back and lo-and-behold! It's Stallman.
Someone should make a Richard Lolman pic, "I'm in yer ARPAnet, begging for dates." Or "Online Dating: yer doin' it wrong." Or even "I can has girlfriend?"
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Though in the case of Spam, I'm surprised it wasn't "Mr. Watson, come here, did you kn0w that you can get h0m3 r3f!n@nCINg for less then 6% APR, no questions asked?"
Or, "Mr. Watson, come here, do you want a G1@nt C0ck like me, if so, buy this pill."
Or, "Mr. Watson, come here, you great uncle from Nigeria just died and you stand to inherit a fortune!"
Monstar L
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 ...
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
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
How come Al Gore isn't on this list? Interesting...
A: Older than spam, kiddo.
Q: ooooooooh
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
This was written in 1978.
For some reason, I really can't get that to settle in, and as much as I hate to call RMS a "visionary", that comment might as well have been written last week...
The fact that RMS and his supporters "won" this side of the debate may very well have played a significant role in shaping the events of the past 15 years.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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